September 15, 2010
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Daily Botanical Places

Pillow Cotton

I couldn’t resist sharing another image from the presentation I am working on and will be giving later this month.

This is Giant Milkweed (Gossypium). The only time I saw it on the trip was when we travelled to the north end of Barbados to visit the Animal Flower Cave. The cave was a must-do item for me. When I was growing up, my mother, who is from Barbados, spoke of it fondly. What she described was an ocean-side cave filled with blooming flower animals: sea anemones. Unfortunately, the anemone population has dwindled significantly over the years. While the cave and the surrounding landscape was fantastic, and one of the highlights of the Barbados leg of our trip, what I saw was nothing like the cave as it would have been in my mother’s day.

But I digress. When I hopped off of the last of a three bus journey, the very first plant I noticed was the Giant Milkweed. How could I miss it? It looked like an overgrown version of the milkweed that grows in dry landscapes here in Toronto. The landscape at the north end of the island, and on Barbados in general, is quite dry and flat. There are a lot of dry fields. For that reason, I didn’t see this plant in Dominica, an island that is almost entirely mountainous rainforest!

I did some research and discovered that Giant Milkweed is sometimes called “pillow cotton” because the giant pods are filled with a soft and silky fibre that was once used to fill pillows. How appropriate. You see, for a good month prior to our trip I worried endlessly about the availability of a decent pillow in Dominica and wondered aloud to anyone who would listen as to how I might pack my pillow in addition to all the books and camera gear I felt necessary. This is all because I read somewhere that there was a pillow shortage in Dominica due to a fire, and that it is hard to get stuff there period, regardless. Which is true.

I know this sounds very Princess and the Pea, but I assure you that I can sleep on rocks as long as I have a good pillow. I NEED my pillow. Of course, after all of that fuss, I forgot the pillow at home and then worried about it endlessly during our 4 days in Barbados. Where could I get a pillow? When would I get a pillow and would it take me over Liat’s minuscule carry on limit?

I should have harvested some “pillow cotton” from the Giant Milkweed and made my own while I had the chance.

Amazingly, later that night — our last night in Barbados, and well after I had resigned myself to “suck it up already”– I purchased the perfect pillow from a group of ladies (the Pillow Ladies), and at the fish market of all places!

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September 8, 2010
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Places

Bromeliads in the Valley of Desolation

Later this month I am giving a presentation to the Parkdale Horticultural Society on my trip to the West Indies. In preparation, I am striving to finish scanning all of the film photos I took, not including the Polaroids, because frankly, I’ve got to draw the line somewhere or I’ll never be done.

I’m doing this scanning in the background, while writing and working on other topics, most specifically a third book (with a deadline that is coming up all too soon) that has absolutely nothing to do with this trip. It’s a strange form of multi-tasking. Working my way through the images in quick succession is a sort-of re-living of the sights and experiences, and it is also bringing back emotions I felt at the time while also reconnecting me to older emotions related to my family. I wish I had more time to devote to this specifically right now, but alas there are only so many waking hours in the day.

Anyways, I am just now working my way through the film photos I took on our 8 hour hike to and from the Boiling Lake. This is one of my most memorable experiences from the trip and one I’d LOVE to experience again. My favorite part of the hike was the trek across the Valley of Desolation, also shown here. I didn’t want to leave and lingered for a few minutes on the way out before turning my back on this incredible landscape, possibly forever.

There are stories, of course, rumors of people staying in the valley overnight and dying from the fumes. A place with such a biblical name is bound to inspire the imagination. The energy and volatility there was like travelling back in time to the earth’s beginnings, just after land and plant life had formed.

There was no lava, but there was bubbling mud. The smoke in the photo is sulphur. I could see it escaping all around me through vents. And feel it and hear it underneath my feet; sometimes without seeing it. And smell it. Oh, could I smell it. In fact, I lived with the smell of sulphur in the air during most of my stay in Dominica. It was strongest at night when the breeze picked it up and carried it down from the Roseau Valley. In St. Lucia we stayed in Soufriere, just around the way from another stinking sulphurous caldera. The smell seemed to collect and concentrate in our bedroom at night. The first night I smelled it was before our early morning decent to the Boiling Lake and I have to admit that I couldn’t rest, worried that I’d slip away quietly in my sleep from the noxious-smelling gas like one of those campers. I do not miss that rotten egg smell.

Despite the name, there was life in the Valley of Desolation. The most common plant is the bromeliad pictured above. It literally covered the mountainside and dotted the landscape that we walked across. It is endemic to this very place — you won’t see it anywhere else in the world. After doing extensive searching online, I believe it is called, Pitcairnia micotrinensis, although I am not absolutely, 100% certain. I’m a pretty decent researcher, but I am no botanist.

I’d love to go back when it is blooming! The flowers are yellow and white. Can you imagine the display? Wouldn’t that be something to see?!

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August 19, 2010
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Daily Botanical Herbs Places

Essence Fragile

We’ve finally had all of the film from our Caribbean trip developed and I now have the arduous task of scanning it all before the end of September (27th), when I will be giving a presentation, here in Toronto, of some of the botanical images.

I took this photo while on a tour of an organic farm in Bellvue Chopin — the one with the cute land turtles pictured here.

The plant is Polygala paniculata, also known as ‘Essence Fragile’ in Dominica. It’s a medicinal herb that is often added to baby’s bathwater as it is believed to help their bones “knit.”

The roots smell of fresh wintergreen!

You can see mountain in the background of this photo. Mountains are in the background of every photo I took in Dominica, unless I was facing the coast. Mountains, mountains everywhere. No matter where you are on the island, you are always going either up or down a steep hill. And it is always hot and incredibly humid. It made San Francisco seem like a cakewalk.

Imagine farming in 365 days-a-year heat and humidity, with access to few resources, weeds that NEVER stop growing, and all on steep hills, no less. I’ve seen mountainside, terraced farming once before (Agave in Oaxaca Mexico), but the logistics of farming in Dominica still came as a shock.

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August 16, 2010
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Places

One Day in Barbados

It’s about as hot as the Caribbean out there this week, if not hotter, so I thought I’d dip back into the pool of photos I took on the first real day of our month long journey through the Caribbean this past December. I still remember the giddiness we felt knowing that we had over 30 days without hardcore work or serious responsibility ahead of us. FREEDOM.

We began the trip in Barbados, staying in Christ Church for 4 days before heading to Dominica, our primary destination. There are no International flights to Dominica, so traveling there means flying to another island and transferring via a local airline such as Liat. Since we had to go somewhere else anyways, I suggested flying into Barbados and staying there a few days since it is where my mother is from and where my maternal relatives (aunts, uncle, grandmother, cousins) emigrated from to Canada. We didn’t stay long because it is a very high-traffic touristy place that would easily eat into our budget. I also had personal reasons against staying there long and was most eager to get to Dominica. Now that I’ve been, I regret that we didn’t stay longer and I would like to go back. Barbados and Dominica are very different places in more ways than just population and traffic. Barbados is a coral island, while Dominica is volcanic.The landscape is very flat and the heat incredibly dry compared to Dominica, which is entirely mountainous and predominantly covered in rain forest.


Davin waiting for the bus somewhere in Christ Church.

We started the first day of our trip hoping to walk from our hotel in Christ Church, through the countryside, and into Oistens, a fishing town that was listed at about 2 miles away. Of course, we got started just before noon, the hottest part of the day. The hotel receptionist looked appalled when we asked for a map or directions. Surely these winter-white Canadians do not think they can make it all that way through the heat! And we didn’t, but we put in a good effort and did continue walking past Oistens later in the day after we gave up and hitched a ride with a local van-bus.

Oh how I LOVED the public bus system in Barbados. The rides were often too fast and furious, the wait for buses unbearably slow, and at times we were packed in like sardines (Was it 20 people in a van one night, Davin?). And yet it turned out to be the very best way to see the island and connect with people. I had as much fun riding the buses as I did swimming in the ocean and discovering tropical plants. Dominica has a similar bus system but with a much, much smaller ridership, which made for an incredibly frustrating and impossible system to navigate. I am not exaggerating when I say that it took several hair-pulling attempts and the entire three weeks of our stay before we finally cracked the secret code that dictates where to catch buses and when. And that was with a lot of help from locals!! No one wants to give bad news, so time and time again we’d be told “Soon come” or “You’re alright, man!” as a reply to when the bus was coming and if we were waiting in the right spot… only to discover later on that there were no more buses that day and we were NOT waiting in the right spot for any bus!


This was before I REALLY started to worry about the no-show bus.

In Barbados there were bus signs everywhere, buses constantly honked to ask if you wanted on, and it always cost exactly $1.50. On only one occasion did I truly worry about catching a bus when we sat on the side of the road WAYYYY on the other side of the island for almost 2 hours at dusk hoping to god that a bus would come before dark so we wouldn’t be stuck in the middle of nowhere without cash, maps, bank machines, food, or a sense of direction.

But I digress. Tangent, tangent, tangent. What I really set out to do today was show a few pictures of plants and gardens we saw one day in Barbados…

Read more…

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July 23, 2010
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Daily Botanical Places Veggies

Seasoning Peppers

Photo by Gayla Trail All Rights Reserved

In the Caribbean, that’s what they call peppers that look like hot peppers but aren’t. Although, I have also heard the term used with hot peppers, too. I suspect they really are hot, just not by West Indian standards. All of these were hot, let me tell you, and incredibly aromatic. But hot, ho yeah, at least by my standards.

There was a time when I took pride in my ability to withstand the hottest hot peppers, but those days are long gone. My nearly middle aged digestive system would rather not, thank you ever so much and good night. I like growing hot peppers, and it is always fun to discover a new variety, but these days I enjoy them in small doses.

The green peppers in this photo were a gift from Stevie, Not Wonder. The little peppers were found growing on a bush behind our cottage. The rest were collected here and there. Pepper bushes are fantastically huge in the Caribbean heat. They grow on and on into perpetuity and are not hard to come by.

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