“The first part of the road [to the settlement] passed through a thicket of nearly leafless underwood as in Chatham Island. The wood gradually becomes greener during the ascent. Out of the wood extensive patches have been cleared, in which sweet Potatoes (convolvulus Batata) & Plantains grow with luxuriance…Since… Brazil we have not seen so Tropical a landscape, but there is a great deficiency in the absence of the lofty, various & all-beautiful trees of that country…how pleasant… in walking the pathways to find black mud & on the trees…mosses, ferns & Lichens & Parasitical plants adhæring.”
Charles Darwin The Journal of a Voyage in H.M.S. Beagle
September 25th 1835
