All of Jamaica, it has been said, is a botanical garden. Inland, the mountain clefs and gullies, often coursed by streams, are tangled with greenery, the trees woolly and blurred with epiphytes, ferns, orchids and the night-scented, night-blooming cereus. An island with a total area of less than 4,000 square miles, Jamaica has 579 species of ferns alone, a higher density, it is believed, than anywhere else in the world. Epiphytes dangle from telephone wires; the forests are hung with flowering vines; often on this trip I thought of how Bligh and the men of the Providence must have been reminded here of the lush blue-green landscape of Tahiti. – from “Captain Bligh’s Cursed Breadfruit,” by Caroline Alexander, Smithsonian (September 2009)