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Bill BrysonA Walk in the Woodspp. 150 |
The first people to venture deep into the woods from the east...
The first people to venture deep into the woods from the east (the Indians, of course, had got there perhaps as muc as 20,000 years before them) weren’t looking for historic creatures and passages to the west or new lands to settle. They were looking for plants. America’s botanical possibilities excited Europeans inordinately, and there was both glory and monet to be made out in the woods. The eastern woods teemed with flora unknown to the old world and there was a huge eagerness, from scientists and amateur enthusiasts alike, to get a piece of it. Imanine if tomorrow a spaceship found a jungle growing beneath the gassy mountains of Venus. Think what Bill Gates, say, would pay for some tendrilled, purply-lobed piece of Venusian exotica to put in a pot in his greenhouse. That was the rhododendron in the eighteennth century - and the camellia, the hydrangea, the wild cherry, the rudbeckia, the azalea, the aster, the ostrich fern, the catalpa, the spice bush, the Venus flytrap, the Virginia creeper, the euphorbia. These and hundreds more were collected in the American woods, shipped across the ocean to England and France and Russia, and received with greedy kenness and trembling fingers.