OF PALM TREES—OF VARIETIES OF FISH—AND OF FRUIT AND LIARS AND BARON MUNCHAUSEN
LET us return to the matter of growth in southern Florida. Everything, as has been said, grows there. There are twenty-nine varieties of palm trees; and one can spend an entire week doing nothing but check up palm trees. According to official count there are two hundred and seventy-five different varieties of fish in southern Florida waters—or there were toward the middle of last February. A new variety is discovered every week. Unofficial counters say that there are more than seven hundred varieties. The unofficial ones are probably nearer right than the official ones. There are so many different varieties of fruit that if one attempted to eat every variety in one day, he would unquestionably burst with a loud majority report. A partial list of fruits which are being successfully raised in Florida’s southernmost county, provided by a man with a poor memory, contains avocado—or alligator pear, custard apple, mammea apple, Jamaica apple, rose apple, Bugamot, citron, banana, Barbadoes cherry, chermoyas, cecropia, Surinam cherry, carissa, Jackfruit, lime, lemon, loquat, various sorts of mangoes, fifty-seven different varieties of orange, a number of crosses between oranges and other things, grapefruit, eggfruit, dates, olives, monsterosa deliciosa, papaya, pomegranate, Japanese persimmon, sour sop, sapote, sapodillo, strawberry, tomato. If a Floridan has plenty of time at his disposal, he can think up twenty or thirty more fruits that are fruiting constantly and energetically in southern Florida.
One of the unfortunate features of discussing southern Florida lies in the fact that if one isn’t careful, his non-Florida or anti-Florida hearers will suspect him of having taken money to advertise the state. They will, in short, suspect him of exaggeration when he carelessly mentions the ever-sunny skies and the perfect-thirty-four bathing girls and the amazing growths. The whole subject is fraught with risks. Baron Munchausen would never have been able to work up a reputation as a liar in southern Florida, because his lies weren’t much more startling than the things that happen there every day. But if the Baron had sandwiched a few Florida facts among his lies and had tried them out on his neighbors some evening after his second gallon of Dortmunder beer, they would have slapped one another on the back and rolled around in their chairs with tears of mirth pouring down their cheeks, and assured one another between their spasmodic gasps and groans of merriment that there never would be anybody in the world who would be able to tell such downright ridiculous, preposterous, side-splitting, hair-raising lies as the Baron.