browsing ground for moose.

So neither race nor age nor melange of blood can eradicate the love
of flowers. It would be a wonderful thing to know about the first
garden that ever was, and I wish that "Best Beloved" had demanded
this. I am sure it was long before the day of dog, or cow, or horse,
or even she who walked alone. The only way we can imagine it, is to go
to some wild part of the earth, where are fortunate people who have
never heard of seed catalogs or lawn mowers.

Here in British Guiana I can run the whole gamut of gardens, within a
few miles of where I am writing. A mile above my laboratory up-river,
is the thatched _benab_ of an Akawai Indian--whose house is a roof,
whose rooms are hammocks, whose estate is the jungle. Degas can speak
English, and knows the use of my 28-gauge double barrel well enough to
bring us a constant supply of delicious bushmeat--peccary, deer,
monkey, bush turkeys and agoutis. But Grandmother has no language but
her native Akawai. She is a good friend of mine, and we hold long
conversations, neither of us bothering with the letter, but only the
spirit of communication. She is a tiny person, bowed and wrinkled as
only an old Indian squaw can be, always jolly and chuckling to
herself, although Degas tells me that the world is gradually
darkening for her. And she vainly begs me to clear the film which is
slowly closing over her eyes. She labors in a true landscape
garden--the small circle wrested with cutlass and fire from the great
jungle, and kept free only by constant cutting of the vines and lianas
which creep out almost in a night, like sinister octopus tentacles, to
strangle the strange upstarts and rejungle the bit of sunlit glade.

Although to the eye a mass of tangled vegetation, an Indian's garden
may be resolved into several phases--all utterly practical, with color
and flowers as mere by-products. First come the provisions, for if
Degas were not hunting for me, and eating my rations, he would be out
with bow and blowpipe, or fish-hooks, while the women worked all day
in the cassava field. It is his part to clear and burn the forest, it
is hers to grub up the rich mold, to plant and to weed. Plots and beds
are unknown, for in every direction are fallen trees, too large to
burn or be chopped up, and great sprawling roots. Between these,
sprouts of cassava and banana are stuck, and the yams and melons which
form the food of these primitive people. Cassava is as vital to th