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Plants of Guam
From August 1899 to August 1900, William Edwin Safford, a young officer in the United States Navy, was stationed on the island of Guam as vice-governor. Safford's field was ethnobotany, but his range of interest was extremely wide and profound. His absorption with Chamorro lore led him to prepare for the American Anthropology Series many papers concerning the Marianas, including the first serious handbook on the surviving Chamorro language. He also chronologized the early history of the island, cataloguing for the first time its extensive and exotic array of tropical plants, both those indigenous to Guam and those introduced by visitors and settlers.
When Safford died in 1926, he was still actively writing and associated with the United States National Herbarium as consulting economic botanist. His fascinating delineation of island plant life remains a standard guide to anyone curious about the flora of a tropical outpost. It would not be possible here to list even the most generally known of the plants growing on Guam, so I have deemed it best to feature some of the essential staple plants used in the aboriginal and more recent past for food, clothing and shelter, for medicine and paint. These accounts are taken from Safford's writings and more or less follow the pattern delineated by him. The array of plants is unusual indeed, including plants that are palliatives for leprosy, oranges whose skin can be lathered like soap, sea-voyaging beans from the futu tree whose pods cast themselves into the island's surf and are sometimes carried thousands of miles by ocean currents, and curative plants like the bastard currant—a bush with white flowers whose root was used as a remedy for syphilis, bronchitis, and even asthma.
Scientists who study the Pacific islands have been able to trace the ethnological distribution of various aboriginal races through the migration and arrangement of plant life on the various chains and groups of islands. On Guam several prime plants were cultivated which were virtually unknown in eastern Polynesia, for example, the betel pepper, the areca palm (betel nut), and rice. All evidence points to their Malayan origin; they even bear Malayan names and probably found their way to Melanesia after the departure of the people who spread over the islands of the Eastern Pacific, but some time before Guam's settlers left their parent stock. Most arresting proof is the resemblance that the Chamorro name for rice (fae, or fai) bears to the Javanese name (bai), rather than the Philippine name (palai). Numerous examples of this sort exist in the island languages, carrying weight where ethnological beginnings are concerned, and tying together racial origin with the origin and migration of plant life.
The primary association with the word "tropical" is usually "coconut," and in terms of Guam's past, although no longer true, the coconut was one of the prime life sources since aboriginal times. The first accurate description of the coconut was published in Dampier's Voyages from observations made by him during his Guam visit of 1686. Magellan's chronicler, Pigafetta, had noted that the natives had used coconut oil scented with flowers to anoint their bodies and hair, but Dampier's description is more elaborate:
"The Nut or Fruit grows at the head of the Tree, [he writes] among the Branches and Clusters, 10 to 12 in a Cluster. . . . The Nut is generally bigger than a Man's Head. . . . The Kernel in some Nuts is very thick sticking to the inside of the Shell clear round, leaving a hollow in the middle of it, which contains about a Pint, more or less, according to the bigness of the Nut. . . .
"This Cavity is full of sweet, delicate, wholesome and refreshing Water. While the Nut is growing, all inside is full of this Water, without any Kernel at all; but as the Nut grows toward Maturity, the Kernel begins to gather and settle round on the inside of the Shell, and is soft like Cream; and as the Nut ripens, it increaseth in substance and becomes hard. The ripe Kernel is sweet enough, but very hard to digest, therefore seldom eaten, unless by strangers, who know not the effects of it; but while it is young and soft like Pap, some Men will eat it, scraping it out with a Spoon, after they have drunk the water that was within it. I like the Water best when the Nut is almost ripe, for it is then sweetest and briskest."
Dampier goes on to describe how the nut falls to earth, splits, sprouts, feeds upon its meat until it has sent roots securely into the ground, and concludes, after comparing the trees of Guam and their habits with East Indian groves: "These at Guam grow in dry ground, are of middle size, and I think the sweetest that I did ever taste."
Dampier was accurate about the coconut meat; it is seldom eaten ripe by the Pacific Island natives, and Guam is no exception. Fed to cattle it fattens them rapidly, and it is considered excellent human food when a rich custard is made from the grated meat and served in native style with boiled fowl or with crab meat. One reason for the coconut's attractiveness to early voyagers was its portable endurance. However, long before, Dampier and other navigators had discovered that only the milk of the young coconut was bland enough to substitute for water. The milk of mature nuts caused diarrhea.
Besides the conversion of coconut meat into export copra (dried meat which is used for commercial oil and fertilizer), another odd use persists in modern times. The meat is used to fatten the coconut crab which is usually caught at night with bait of freshly-split coconuts laid on the open ground. Legend claims that this crab would climb trees, clip off coconuts with its powerful claws, descend, tear off the husk, and break the shell, forcing the nut open to get at its kernel. But native crab hunters claim that the ayuyu, strong as its pincers are, cannot open the nut by itself. Crabs setting upon coconuts become so engrossed in their greedy work that they are easily taken, and usually penned in a bamboo cage and fattened upon coconuts until they are ready to be boiled and served the same way as cold, cracked sea crab with a side dish of Guamanian sauce. (See Chapter 4—Food.)
In ancient days all the houses of Guam were built with local wooden frames and thatched coconut leaves. Even sword grass from the savannahs was sometimes used. Coconut leaves to be thatched were first dried and split down the midrib, the two halves being placed together in reverse direction and leaflets interwoven diagonally. This was usually the women's work, and leaves thus prepared were then lashed to the wooden framework with strips of pandanus leaves, beginning at the eaves and ending at the ridgepole, the leaves being placed together to form a thick imbricating thatch. Coconut thatch is not durable, however, and even the most painstaking job would not last much longer than four years, due to the intense action of sun and rain. Hurricanes would often quickly destroy the thatching.
Coconut fiber was also popular for plaiting mats, and the pandanus leaf fibers, used in housebuilding as lashing, were exceptionally strong material for making native sun hats, sleeping mats, working mats upon which corn, maize, and other seed were dried, or even large bags for holding and storing rice or corn.
With the advent of Spanish civilization upon the island came a further use for the coconut: the manufacture of toddy (tuba), a fermented drink made from the sap of the coconut tree. The Spanish introduced this beverage in Guam in an effort to reduce the number of natives and nearly succeeded by the production of this drink alone, and later, by the production of aguardiente, an occasionally highly toxic native rum distilled from tuba. The agreeable, passive natives could tolerate the effects of their local plant narcotics, the areca palm nut and the betel pepper leaf, but alcoholic drink was more of a scourge than a release. Actually, according to Padre Blanco in an early chronicle of the island, the Filipinos were more susceptible to their own poisonous concoction than the Chamorros, and when using aguardiente chronically they suffered great harm—insomnia, loss of appetite, premature old age, great obesity, and often a syndrome of other diseases resembling dropsy and the dreaded scurvy, and sometimes even insanity.
On the other hand, the reliable banana was put to no such devious uses in Guam. It was growing on the island before Magellan. Pigafetta describes "figs a palm long," which were probably the plantain, a large and starchy banana which must be cooked to be palatable. Other varieties, those edible when raw, were introduced in greater variety after the Spanish settled, being brought in by Pacific travelers. One small native banana has a truly delicious perfumed flavor, though not a handsome fruit.
Before the days of refrigeration, a few bananas were exported from Guam, but the crop now is barely sufficient for island needs. In those days the fruit was preserved by cutting it into strips or slices and drying it, or by making it into flour. Ripe bananas were always used for the process, peeled and then sliced lengthwise, dried first by oven heat, and then by the sun. Packed in boxes in a wrapping of dried leaves, they were thus exported. In this form they retained their sun-sweetness and were sugary and flavorful.
Banana flour is still made in the same fashion as in ancient days: from unripe bananas scalded in hot water to facilitate their peeling, sliced and dried, pulverized, sifted, and then packed in moisture-proof containers. Green fruit is best for the process, harvested before the starch has had a chance to convert to sugar. In the old method banana flour was packed into boxes or barrels lined with paper. It is still yellowish of color, sweetly agreeable to the taste. It combines readily with water, eggs, milk, or any sort of broth but will not mold into bread, though it is pleasant for sweet biscuits and cakes.
THE BREADFRUIT TREE
Of all the truly indigenous trees of Guam, perhaps the breadfruit was the most important food staple of the islanders outside of the coconut and rice. Today it would hardly be called an important food staple, although it is used in the remote southern portions of the island as an ancient delicacy on festive, religious, and family occasions. Now it is more admired for its really magnificent shape, its handsome leaves, and the beauty of its melon-like fruit than for its basic usefulness.
There are two main types of breadfruit on Guam: the seedless variety (lemae) and the seeded type (dugdug). The lemae must be propagated by hand and thus grows only in accessible and generally cultivated regions, around homes and in the towns and villages of the island, and its sterility has given rise to the anthropological argument that the tree must certainly have been brought to Guam by the aboriginal settlers when they migrated from Malaysia.
The fruit of the tree, when yellow-ripe, has the consistency and taste of newly baked bread and sweet potato. Although its flavor is not wholly attractive at first sampling, a taste for it can be acquired. In Guam the breadfruit was cooked in the traditional Pacific island fashion, by means of heated stones placed in the ground, with layers of hot stones and leaves alternating with breadfruit, then the whole of this covered over with earth or more stones and allowed to steam until cooked. Even today it is baked in this manner, although the method most popular with early voyagers and the colonial Spanish was to boil or bake it in ovens, or to fry it like sliced potatoes. The Guamanian ovens used in the 19th century were Mexican in origin, their design having been brought by Mexican soldiers who were introduced to assist in one of the periodic "reductions" of the native populace. By the use of this oven the Chamorros eventually devised a long-lasting staple from the shortlived breadfruit by cutting it into slices after it was thoroughly baked in the Mexican ovens and then drying these slices thoroughly in the sun or in the ovens. Slices dried like this will last from one breadfruit season to another, and the Chamorros often put aside supplies such as this until refrigeration made this precaution against famine unnecessary.
Breadfruit's fine ripe yellow fruit and large green leaves make it a handsome dooryard tree, but though the lemae may grow to a sizeable height, it is not very hardy. The wood, in fact, is rather brittle in texture and is susceptible to typhoon damage. Often trees are snapped completely in half, as happened in the case of one in our front garden during the 1949 hurricane; its upper half was carried off into the air and probably dropped in the sea by the wind's force. However, from the lower half of the trunk a new umbrella of foliage grew up in about a year and made a second canopy of graceful, filigreed leaves to shade our porch.
The breadfruit was once of great economic value to the native. A kind of tapa cloth similar to the Tahitian fibrecloth (made from the paper mulberry, which is not grown on Guam) was fashioned from the fibrous inner bark of young trees or branches. A lumpy glue and crude calking material was also obtained, much in the manner of rubber-tree milking, from the viscid milky juice (latex) which flows from the incised trunk. Bark cloth is no longer made even for decorative reasons, and it is interesting to recall that during the eleven years after the Spanish discovery of the island (and before the Jesuit "occupation"), when no ship visited Guam, there was such a scarcity of woven fabrics for women's undergarments that they were fashioned from the bark of the breadfruit tree, as they had been in aboriginal times.
The breadfruit's latex has also been employed for the mixing of paint and as a sizing for whitewash. In aboriginal paint, the blacks and reds commented on by early explorers and used on native outriggers were a red ferruginous earth and a kind of lampblack. The latter was made by burning coconut shells, and the former of earth scooped from the northern plateau's cliff deposits of iron.
Fruit from the dugdug (the variety of breadfruit used for other purposes than food) is quite inferior to that of the lemae, and smaller. The fruit is not frequently eaten, but its seeds (nangka) are rich in oil. Sometimes they are boiled or roasted, having the taste of chestnuts, and are much enjoyed by the natives.
Leaves and bark of the breadfruit are a favorite forage for cattle, and young trees therefore must be protected. In dry seasons during scarce pasture the large glossy dark-green leaves are often gathered and fed to livestock, and today, being as little harvested as it is, the fruit is often so abundant that it will support a whole ranch of cattle, horses, and pigs.
Dampier was introduced to breadfruit and found it sweet and pleasant, and explained that "the Natives of this Island use it for Bread; they gather it when full grown, whilst it is green and hard: then they bake it in an oven, which scorcheth the rind and makes it black; but they scrape off the outside black crust, and there remains a tender thin crust, and the inside is soft, tender and white, like the crumb of a Penny Loaf. There is neither seed nor stone in the inside, but all is of a pure substance like Bread. This fruit lasts in season 8 months in the year, during which time the Natives eat no other sort of food of Bread kind. I did never see of this Fruit anywhere but here. The Natives told us, that there is plenty of this Fruit growing on the rest of the Ladrone Islands; and I did never hear of any of it anywhere else."
OTHER FOOD STAPLES
Rice and maize are both cultivated at the present time, though only rice was grown on the island before Magellan. It is among the products mentioned by Pigafetta (1521), by Legazpi (1565), and by Oliver van Noort of the Nassau Fleet expedition (1600).
According to early accounts it was cultivated in many spots on the island by natives who sold it to visiting ships in mat bags weighing 70 to 80 pounds. The practical Dutch complained that the natives were dishonest in their dealings, for not one parcel of rice bought from them was without false stone weights hidden in the bulk of the rice and not discovered until the ships were at sea. The product, however, was considered excellent. Today, rice is cultivated in the traditional Filipino manner. It is a common sight in the southern end of the island to see rice fields being plowed with the classic wooden, iron-pointed instrument, drawn by a plodding grey carabao.
The aboriginals had three kinds of rice: red (agaga), coarse-grained (basto), and a fine fragrant variety brought from the island of Rota by the Spanish and called palay aromático. According to one of the principal rice-growers, Don Antonio Martinez, at the time of the 1898 occupation, rice was formerly cultivated both in and near the flooded natural marshes of the island, and also on dry land. Now what little cultivation there is is entirely in controlled wet areas.
Maize was introduced with success from Mexico by the Spaniards, and also the sweet potato, although the yam was already widely cultivated by the natives as a food staple. Coffee and cocoa were also Spanish introductions, and even today some families maintain their single coffee and chocolate trees adjacent to the family dwelling. No tea seems to have been cultivated in Guam, although in recent times both the Chinese and English types of tea have come into popular use, served hot and iced.
NARCOTIC PLANTS
In aboriginal times, without the occasional beneficence of distilled liquors, wines, or tobacco, the natives of the Pacific islands discovered, probably because they had need of it, the areca palm and the betel pepper vine. The native Chamorros were forced to cultivate the pepper vine, growing it about their homes and villages, while the areca palm grew wild. This palm, which was introduced in prehistoric times and not considered indigenous, was originally planted for the sake of its aromatic seeds, more commonly known as betel nuts. The tree has a tall trunk, slender and ringed, and its white flowers are fragrant. The fruit is an orange-colored nut about the size of a pullet's egg, with a fibrous outer husk and similar in flavor and consistency to nutmeg. It grows in pendant bunches below dark green leaves. The tree thrives in damp forest regions, along the margins of running streams, and for this reason, although the use of betel nut is still prevalent among modern Guamanians, the nut must now be sought considerably inland, thereby becoming increasingly more difficult to obtain.
For eating, the nut is divided in sections and a portion of it wrapped in a fresh pepper-vine leaf, together with a pinch of quicklime. The quicklime imparts a red bloodlike color to the saliva, so that, while chewing, the lips and teeth appear to be smeared with blood. In time this action turns the teeth completely black and will generally destroy the enamel and cause extensive decay. A packet made up for chewing is called a mamao, which has become a subject of Chamorro song.
Besides its social use, the betel nut's active principle is arecaine, a powerful agent for destroying tapeworms. As powerful as nicotine, in its pure state, one half a grain of arecaine would kill a small animal and would be highly dangerous to a human being. Its native dosage as a vermifuge is a teaspoon of freshly grated kernel. Throughout the Malay archipelago the nut has always been of considerable commercial importance, and one wonders if the diversion of its use from a pure medicine to a pleasurable social instrument among island people was not the secondary discovery of its efficacy in aboriginal times.
CONSTRUCTION PLANTS
Materials are abundantly at hand for the building of huts. Stands made of the chopag tree still exist—an excellent, hard, fine-grained and durable wood formerly used as posts and beams in all the finest native huts. Pandanus leaves are available for lashings, and the omnipresent nipa palm, hardly used in modern times except in the southern villages for storehouse construction, is at hand near the mouths of all the island streams for thatching material.
The nipa palm was at one time the cause for many communal get-togethers among the islanders. Natives would gather at the homesite of a friend and assist in the thatching. A pig might be slaughtered and roasted, betel-pepper and areca nuts were passed around, homemade cigars were lit, even bamboo jugs of tuba were dispensed—and the work of finishing a house festively went forward to completion in a very short time.
IFILWOOD
Before the import of wood from the west coast of the United States, the ifilwood tree was Guam's most important timber tree. The heartwood is prodigiously heavy, hard, and not elastic. It is termite-resistant, and such a blessing in the tropics could hardly escape use as fence and house foundation posts, or as furniture. The pillars of the old Spanish church at Agaña, ruined by war, were hewn from solid ifil trunks cut near the site of the building. The wood is saffron when cut, finally turning black walnut in color. Although coarse-grained, it takes a glossy polish which does not dull with time.
In 1898 Americans found all the better houses of Guam furnished with tables and settees made from this remarkable wood, and in exceptional cases, even floors, which were polished with grated coconut wound in a soft cloth to emphasize their lustrous tone.
Houses made of newly cut ifilwood are not whitewashed or painted until the wood has had time to dry and season and turn its final dark shade. The tobacco-colored sap of the wood rises to the outer surface of the wood as it dries and will ruin whitewash unless the wood is completely cured before it is applied. Old and properly seasoned ifil becomes so hard that holes must be bored into it in order to drive in nails or fit screws.
Two types of functional bamboo grow profusely on Guam—the thorny bamboo and the smooth bamboo. The thorny variety is studded with spines and in the moist, decaying interior valleys it sometimes attains a height of fifty feet, growing so fast that it can literally be seen to rise several inches a day on its stalk. The thorny variety is the stronger of the two types. Large canes are cut into six- to eight-foot lengths, hollowed out at one end and used for water-carrying vessels, or a pair is tied together with fibre rope and slung over the back of a carabao, as in aboriginal times. Single joints make attractive flowerpots and served in early days as vessels for collecting coconut sap.
Both the thorny and smooth bamboos were used extensively in construction of native huts in aboriginal days, were split into slats and employed as platforms and bed frames, and were used for drinking troughs and pen fences beneath homes for the protection of young fowl from marauding animals. Today bamboo appears more frequently in furniture than in any other role and is ideally adapted to the functional frame chairs and cushioned settees which are now so popular everywhere in the Pacific areas and are spreading through the Americas and Europe.
UNUSUAL PLANTS
Although the range of plant life in Guam when judged by Pacific-island standards is not prodigious, the infinite variety of tropical forests, strand growth, interior valley cultivation, and wild foods is a source of constant awe and wonder to a Statesider used to the more formally controlled aspects of botanical expression. Being able to live—if one had to, and as many Guamanians did during the near-famine periods of the Japanese occupation—only on what one can "pick right off a tree" is still quite possible in some portions of the southern mountains or in the matted cliff jungles of the northern plateau. And this could be a thoroughly interesting and agreeable experience if one cared to explore its possibilities.
William Safford lists scores of edible plants in his Useful Plants of Guam which can be eaten after simply bringing them to a boil, and many others which can be consumed in their natural state. Cashew nuts now grow wild, having spread from their original plantings in villages. The glue-weed, a coarse fodder plant frequently cooked as a potherb, is also used in the treatment of dropsy but is dangerous to small birds feeding on it, for the viscid milk which catches insects will also seal shut the eyes of young fowl if they brush against it.
A four-winged flying bean—tender, free of stringiness, agreeable in flavor—is an excellent cooked vegetable, with its pods often used for native pickles. Having escaped from the fences surrounding green gardens, it now runs wild across the island. New varieties of taro, a succulent plant with edible starchy rootstocks, have been introduced. Thoroughly cooked, it is quite palatable; and raw, after a fermentation process, it becomes the Polynesian poi so highly favored by Hawaiians and southern islanders, though not a native taste of the Chamorros.
The papaw (papaya) tree, looking very much like a palm, yields melon-shaped fruit whose juice, when green, may be used as a natural tenderizer for meat, and when ripe and yellow, may be eaten with either sugar or salt, or in its natural state. Inferior to a musk melon, the papaya is usually an acquired taste for visitors. The soap orange, mentioned earlier, is identical with the species found in Samoa and the Fijis, and it is considered to be of prehistoric indigenous origin throughout the Marianas. It is a wild orange and was falsely called by the Spanish "the bitter Seville orange." It is not easily edible and has a tough skin which upon drying becomes shell-like in its hardness. In Guam at the beginnng of the 1898 occupation, it was a common sight to see scores of women and girls standing waist deep in the winding, dammed-up Agaña River with their oblong shallow wooden trays (bateas) before them. On these trays the family linen would be spread, rubbed with orange pulp from the soap orange, and vigorously scrubbed with a corncob. Often the entire surface of the river where the current was sluggish would be covered with decaying orange skins. The soap orange, which is not sweet, is particularly fine for tart marmalade.
Guam lemons are miniature, of fine quality, and grow almost spontaneously in the warm atmosphere of the island. Formerly planted to make impenetrable thicket defenses against foraging animals, the plants now grow wild and range throughout Guam. Their juice is perfect for seasoning meats and flavoring iced drinks, as any islander will tell you. Mangoes grow wild in certain areas, but, despite reports to the contrary, the fruit is not top-grade and cannot compare in either sweetness or size with the delicious Philippine mango on Luzon.
The screw pine or pandanus exists on Guam in three varieties: a knob-fruited species whose kernels are edible, a fragrant-fruited type whose drupes are the particular fancy of the flying fox, and the textile screw pine, whose dry leaves are most favored by the natives as lashings for hut framework and for securing the lighter nipa-palm thatching. In aboriginal times the textile screw pine served as material for the sails of outrigger canoes and was called aggak tree. The tree is also a convenient roosting place for domestic fowl, placing them out of danger from wild life. The gnarled upper branches make superior walking sticks, and the tough leaves of the pandanus are also used in the plaiting of hats, mats, and carryall bags. It is probable that the rice sold to the early Dutch navigators by the natives was contained in bags woven from these same leaves.
A few native orchids do grow in the inner forests of Guam, although they are not conspicuous for their great beauty. Leis are frequently made from the yellow-flowering ilangilang tree, introduced from the Philippines because of its fragrance. It also furnishes a natural heavy perfume often used in a native cosmetic lotion made of coconut oil.
Yams and many edible wild roots abound. The purslane family offers varieties of greens and potherbs that are extremely palatable. Since the days of long voyages and the plague of scurvy, the preventive and curative qualities of potherbs have been well recognized, and most islanders also eat the young taro leaf to maintain their health. For taste, these must be thoroughly cooked, as must the root. The horseradish tree furnishes an edible pod, if gathered when young and tender, though not to be indulged in too freely, since it has cathartic qualities.
There are also plants to stay away from. Four of these can be used in reef fishing to stupefy fish (see Chapter 3—Animals of Guam), and five have the definite anthelmintic action of destroying intestinal worms. Tangantangan, a locust-like feathery shrub fast overruning the denuded hillsides of certain southern areas, causes the hair of cattle to fall out when eaten. The piga-palayi plant's juice can be used as a snakebite antidote or as a remedy for eating poisonous fish. It was also employed in aboriginal warfare, so legend goes, to poison arrows, although this is not substantiated by accounts.
Other plants have names almost too exotic to be credible. The candlenut tree, similar to the castor bean, is one of these; it is a mild cathartic, nuts of which are sometimes burned as candles. The futu tree, the seagoing pod tree mentioned earlier, is quite abundant on the eastern island shore near Pago Bay. Mangroves send down their multiple roots at the edge of the sea near the mouths of fresh-water streams. Most unusual of these is the milky mangrove, whose acrid sap was thought by the aborigines to be a cure for leprosy; its soft white wood is used for net floats. Most handsome is the many-petaled mangrove, whose astringent bark is employed in tanning leather.
The royal poinciana, also called the flame tree, is a recent introduction and is being propagated widely across the island in an effort to add color to the highways and towns of Guam. In season it has a flaming crest which makes a bright color contrast to the infinite tropical greens of the island. The Marianne caper, a low shrub whose seed capsules make good local pickles, grows on the strand with pink flowers of considerable beauty. It is, so far as records prove, an indigenous plant. Indian pennywort has been introduced and is considered, when an infusion of its leaves is drunk hot, to be excellent in reducing fever and settling the stomachs of children. There is a looking-glass tree, so named because of the silvered undercoating of its leaves, whose wood was once used as wheel spokes in the early-day carts. Jack-in-the-Box (nonag tree), a tinder-wooded tree which easily takes fire, was used for the wood hulls of canoes in earlier times, and its bark used as a depilatory by the native women, since it destroys hair painlessly. Inkberry, antidote lily (a white, flowering beach plant whose bulb is used as an emetic), the asthma herb, Spanish needles (a scorpion-bite remedy), zebrawood (for perfume), scorpion weed, maile (its flower bud is used in weaving floral garlands)—all these unusual and interesting plants, to mention but a few, have their definitive uses.
Several jasmines yield fragrant oil, and their hard wood was formerly used for making plows and outrigging native canoes. A physio nut, growing on a small evergreen shrub used for hedges and fences, is a natural cattle repellent and just what its name implies when eaten. Henna and acacia spread their spiced flowers across the island, the hedge variety being similar to the physio nut.
Although the hibiscus is not indigenous to Guam, it is a handsome touch of color all over the island. Finding the climate ideal, it responds by blooming constantly and growing into thick, trained hedges quickly forming a solid mass of green foliage and wide blossoms around sunlit gardens. The flowertree (for it reaches the height of a small tree in many instances) comes in myriad pastel shades, common among them peach, cerise, orange, cardinal red, lemon yellow, near-white, and many shades of pink.
The chocolate tree is an all-time favorite, for blossoms spring forth from the trunk itself, looking like tiny fragrant parasites. As recently as fifty years ago, cacao beans were put into a jar and given to friends departing for either Manila, the United States, or even Spain. Natives have always considered their chocolate the best in the world and have scorned the hermetically sealed, packaged variety until very recently, saying it tasted like medicine. Among the older inhabitants, it is still the custom to drink chocolate, served quite hot in the late afternoon, and offered to visitors in the home as a matter of etiquette, often with a sweet cake or cookie.
The botany of Guam and its ethnological aspects as studied and delineated by William Safford is an endlessly fascinating study, even to the layman, and it is unfortunate that more of it cannot be unfolded at this point. The history of Guam's flora parallels the history of its aboriginal people, and, the two can hardly be divorced at any point. Without its oasis-like botanical lure, the early navigators would have by-passed Guam for the more southerly islands, and its natural beauties would have been lost to early travelers and settlers. But this possible isolation would not have made any difference in the prodigious charm and wonder of its foliaged hillsides, its volcanic rock jungles garlanded with cascading vines, its prehistoric caves mouldering with picture writings, its hidden waterfalls pouring into shrimp-filled pools, its sword-grass savannahs and limestone spurs, or its weird, unearthly bristle of scrub forests spread over the northwestern plateau. They would merely have been preserved a while longer in their natural state, as would have the rich pattern of aboriginal life that disintegrated so rapidly under the yoke of religious colonization. The virgin island might have flourished through such a bonus period as a proud paradise existing on borrowed time; but sooner or later the Western world was bound to discover it and deem its exploitation expedient.
Today, with the island's conservation and restoration a vital issue, the accent throughout the island is on the cultivation of decorative flora rather than food plants, since the tiny world of Guam no longer depends on its home-grown crops for sustenance in times of typhoon, and edible plants are no longer cultivated as a vital necessity. The display of floral life in Guam, both indigenous and imported, dresses the island in ever brighter colors against its perennial green mantle.
It is not an unlikely prediction that with the final execution of the contemporary planting plan of conservation and the civic beautification now projected by the Government of Guam, the queen island of the Marianas will one day take her place as the most beautiful two hundred and twenty-five square miles of United States territory in any climate. With this distinction she will again become what she has been called in the past—the gem of Micronesia.
