Here no two plants seem alike.

There are more species on an acre here than in all the New Forest, Savernake, or Sherwood.

Stems rough, smooth, prickly, round, fluted, stilted, upright, sloping, branched, arched, jointed, opposite-leaved, alternate-leaved, leaflets, or covered with leaves of every conceivable pattern, are jumbled together, till the eye and brain are tired of continually asking 'What next ?' The stems are of every colour--copper, pink, gray, green, brown, black as if burnt, marbled with lichens, many of them silvery white, gleaming afar in the bush, furred with mosses and delicate creeping film-ferns, or laced with the air-roots of some parasite aloft.

Up this stem scrambles a climbing Seguine {133a} with entire leaves; up the next another quite different, with deeply-cut leaves; {133b} up the next the Ceriman {133c} spreads its huge leaves, latticed and forked again and again.

So fast do they grow, that they have not time to fill up the spaces between their nerves, and are, consequently full of oval holes; and so fast does its spadix of flowers expand, that (as indeed do some other Aroids) an actual genial heat and fire of passion, which may be tested by the thermometer, or even by the hand, is given off during fructification.