of every street
and from almost every point of view, and its constantly changing but
always unfamiliar color says to you at every hour of the day: "You are
no longer looking out upon the dull, muddy green water of the Atlantic
coast; you are on a tropical, palm-fringed coral reef in the remote
solitude of the great South Sea."

Next to the color of the ocean, in its power to suggest remoteness and
unfamiliarity, is the character of the vegetation. The flora of Key West
is wholly tropical, and in my first ramble through the city I did not
discover a single plant, shrub, tree, or flower that I had ever seen in
the North except the oleander. Even that had wholly changed its habits
and appearance, and resembled the pot-grown plant of Northern households
only as the gigantic sequoia of California resembles the stunted
Lilliputian pine of the Siberian tundra. The Key West oleander is not a
plant, nor a shrub; it is a tree. In the yard of a private house on
Carolina Street I saw an oleander nearly thirty feet in height, whose
branches shaded an area twenty feet or more in diameter, and whose
mammoth clusters of rosy flowers might have been counted by the hundred.
Such an oleander as this, even though its leaves and blossoms may be
familiar, seems like a stranger and an exotic, and, instead of modifying
the impression of remoteness and alienation made by the other features
of the tropical environment, it deepens and intensifies it. Among the
vines, plants, shrubs, and trees that I noticed and identified in the
streets and private grounds of Key West were jasmine, bergamot,
poinsettia, hibiscus, almond, banana, sapodilla, tamarind, Jamaica
apple, mango, Spanish lime, cotton-tree, royal poinciana, "Geiger
flower" (a local name), alligator-pear, tree-cactus, sand-box,
cork-tree, banian-tree, sea-grape, cocoanut-palm, date-palm, Indian
laurel, Australian pine, and wild fig. Most of these trees and shrubs do
not grow even in southern Florida, and are to be found, within the
limits of the United States, only in southern California and on the
island of Key West.

A mere perusal of this long list of unfamiliar names will enable the
reader to understand why the vegetation of the island reinforces the
impression of strangeness and remoteness already made by the color of
the sea.

Key West, after the outbreak of war, had two chief centers of interest
and excitement: first, the harbor, between Fort Taylor and the
government wharf, wher