Richard Henry Dana, Jr., after returning from a vacation trip to Cuba, wrote a charming description of a fruit garden that it was his good fortune to visit there: 

“The garden contained a remarkable variety of trees, including some thrifty exotics.  Here the mango, with its peach-like foliage, was bending on the ground with the weight of its ripening fruit; the alligator pear was marvelously beautiful in its full blossom, suggesting, in form and color, the passion flower; the soft, delicate foliage of the tamarind was like our sensitive plant; the banana trees were in full bearing, the deep green fruit (it is ripened and turns yellow off the tree), being in clusters of a hundred, more or less, tipped at the same time by a single, pendent, glutinous bud, nearly as large as a pineapple.  The date palm, so suggestive of the far east, and the only one we had seen in Cuba, was represented by a choice specimen, imported in its youth.  There was also the star-apple tree, remarkable for its uniform and graceful shape, full of green fruit, with here and there a ripening specimen; so, also, was the favorite zapota, its rusty coated fruit hanging in tempting abundance.  From low, broad spreading trees depended the grape fruit, as large as an infant’s head and yellow as gold, while the orange, lime and lemon trees, bearing blossoms, green and ripe fruit all together, met the eye at every turn, and filled the garden with fragrance.  The cocoanut palm, with its tall, straight stem, and clustering fruit, dominated all the rest.  Guava, fig, custard apple, and bread-fruit trees, all were in bearing.

“Our hospitable host plucked freely of the choicest for the benefit of his chance visitors.  Was there ever such a fruit garden before, or elsewhere?  It told of fertility of soil and deliciousness of climate, of care, judgment, and liberal expenditure, all of which combined had turned these half a dozen acres of land into a Gan Eden.  Through his orchard of Hesperides, we were accompanied also by the proprietor’s two lovely children, under nine years of age, with such wealth of promise in their large black eyes and sweet faces as to fix them on our memory with photographic fidelity.  Before leaving the garden we returned with our intelligent host once more to examine his beautiful specimens of bananas, which, with its sister fruit, the plantain, forms so important a staple of fruit in Cuba and throughout all tropical regions.  It seems that the female banana tree bears more fruit than the male, but not so large.  The average clusters of the former comprise here about one hundred, but the latter rarely bears over sixty or seventy distinct specimens of the cucumber-shaped product.  From the center of its large, broad leaves, which gather at the top, when it has reached the height of twelve or fifteen feet, there springs forth a large purple bud ten inches long, shaped like a huge acorn, though more pointed.  This cone hangs suspended from a strong stem, upon which a leaf unfolds, displaying