Cuba

August 4, 2010

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One Life to Live: A Wish List

This post is a little off topic and not exactly related to gardening. Please indulge me as I go off on a completely decadent, shoe-gazing tangent for a moment. Ignoring is also an option. Please also note that I wrote the bulk of this before my birthday last week so the tense is a bit off. One of my goals way back when was to stop spreading myself around and to bring more into this site, even if it doesn’t always fit neatly into the “GARDENING” package. I do try to stay on topic most days.

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It’s my birthday this week and it’s got me on the subject of how I want to spend the year until my next birthday rolls around. 37 is feeling like a big one for me. Like I am poised for a lot of change that I can’t yet determine. When I was younger, I imagined that 33 would be my best year, ever: an ideal age. I imagined that by 33 I would be, “…kicking so much ass!” What that said for the years after 33, I do not know. I only managed to get that far in my imaginings. Back then, my version of kicking ass meant feeling comfortable with myself, feeling accomplished in my work, and not putting up with or eating anymore shit. That is how Gayla at Age 33 looked to me. And then 33 rolled around and it was the year of the TV show that went wrong and other perceived failures, and I spent the remainder of the year carrying around a lot of anger and feeling generally AWKWARD. So 33 wasn’t all that to be sure.

Last year I turned 36. I suddenly felt OLD. It was like I had stepped over an invisible line and whoa, what the hell just happened there? I now have a prominent streak of grey hair on my left side, which I’m really not complaining about. I like it enough as far as grey hair goes. It’s just that sudden physical changes are a bit freaky. I lost a lot of friends at a young age so I became aware of the very real possibility of death and dying earlier than most. But last year I suddenly became more conscious of my mortality in a physical way. That said, I don’t mean for this to be a diatribe on growing older. For the most part I like getting older and look forward to what’s yet to come. I very much appreciate everything that experience has taught me, for better and for worse. I like the person I am now a hell of a lot more than the person I was at 25. Or 30. Or at 33, come to think of it.

I am much closer to achieving that ideal I imagined I’d reach at 33. But it’s a slightly shifted ideal, one that has changed as I have changed and my desires and expectations have matured. I enjoy things more. I find more joy in little details and in the work I do. I’m much less afraid and much more able to see what scares me and push against it effectively. Or still be kind of screwed up about certain things and be okay with that, knowing I’ll figure it out eventually. Or not. Because I’m also a bit more comfortable with my fallibility. I am more conscious of my needs and better able to say no to the things I need to say no to. And saying no doesn’t feel so much like I’m strapping on a pair of boots and going to war as a result. Because I’m also more comfortable with the fact that some people won’t like it when I do. I’m mostly okay with being perceived as a “bitch” sometimes. I hate the subtext behind that word. Being able to say no when I need to has also opened up the possibility for saying yes more often, too. At 36, going on 37 (now going on 38. yikes), I do feel more at ease with myself and accomplished. And I do believe that I am in fact eating far less shit.

All of this to say that my pal Karen recently celebrated a birthday. And on her blog she talks about making this the Year That She Becomes A Woman of a Certain Age. I was very inspired by the post and the way she has defined her goals for the year. Several years ago, when I kept a photoblog that was also more or less a journal, I wrote a list of “Things I Want to Do Before I Die”. It was a vague list as I did not expect that I would accomplish all of those things in my lifetime. It was more or less a guide post for what I might like to do and a kick in the pants to make some of them happen. Inspired by Karen (again), I thought I would resurrect that list and continue it here, the week of my 37th birthday. Some items from the old list have made it to this one and a few have even been accomplished. I did not include anything too personal, because I do believe in keeping some aspects of my life private, and I very much doubt you’d care to know regardless.

Not surprisingly, a good many of the items on my list have to do with travel, food, and PLANTS.

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December 3, 2009

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Flowering Tillandsia

I know, I know. More tropical plant photos and I haven’t even left yet. And it is snowing outside your window. How much more of this can you take?

I’m a jerk. Sorry.

One of the nicer aspects of being dumped three hours away from the hotel we thought we had booked and into a part of Cuba we knew absolutely nothing about was that the hotel, which in many respects embodied several of my resort nightmares, had their own botanical garden AND a food garden that supplied some of the hotel’s produce. This made me very happy. The obnoxious racket of pool bingo blaring over the loudspeaker and drowning out the soothing sounds of tropical birds and the crashing of ocean waves: not so much.

Here’s some pretty tillandsia, a fascinating group of plants that never fails to take my breath away.

And here are some more pictures I have taken on various occasions:

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December 2, 2009

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Giant Tree Fern

I took this photo underneath the canopy of a very large tree fern last year in Cuba. In hindsight I realize that while the area was mountainous, the lower landscape was quite hot and dry. Some lower areas were tree-filled and lush, but when I look back on pictures it is apparent that the region was primarily scrubby grassland.

The only explanation I have for the success of a tree fern in this particular spot is that it was a part of a tended garden. Someone watered it daily!

On a previous trip to Cuba we saw tree ferns growing in the mountains but it has taken me this long to work out that tree ferns, being ferns, most likely prefer cooler, shadier, and moist locations. Duh!

Dominica on the other hand has a lot of rain forest. I expect to see several tree ferns growing wild up in the mountains. Exciting!

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December 1, 2009

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Noni Fruit

Nope, we haven’t left for the tropics yet, although it’s probably starting to look like it based on the pictures I’ve been posting. In this last week before we leave I’ve been looking back on a previous trip to Cuba in anticipation of the sort of flora and food we might see in The Lesser Antilles.

I took this picture in the countryside, just outside the gates of this cemetery. I had absolutely no idea what the tree was and tried to glean some information from two girls that were sitting nearby. My ability to speak Spanish is extremely limited and rather pathetic actually, but you’d be surprised by how much you can communicate with infant level language skills and hand gestures. The trick, I’ve found, is to be friendly, bold, and to not succumb to the frustration of feeling pathetic. The worst culture shock I have experienced was on our first trip to Mexico. I felt so helpless to communicate and was too nervous and self-conscious most of the time to even try. I lost out on a lot of learning and experiences due to a fear of looking like an idiot. Since then I have learned that most people are keen to try if you show real interest and effort.

The girls indicated that the plant was a noni tree, and seemed to suggest it was edible but I’m afraid that I did not try a taste when I had the chance. They seemed disinterested in the fruit, and I figured ingesting a fruit I was not familiar with in the middle of nowhere was probably not a wise idea. Let’s just say, I’ve had some bad experiences in this area before. Lesson learned.

Interestingly enough the fruit is also known as Indian mulberry, a name that is not surprising given that the noni does look like an over-sized, white mulberry. However, it is not related to mulberries and is instead related to coffee.

Wikipedia says noni trees are very drought tolerant and able to thrive in a wide assortment of soil conditions. We found this tree growing in very sandy soil about 30 feet or so from the ocean. I don’t think I saw another tree on that trip and I wonder if I will see it on any of the islands we will be visiting shortly.

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January 28, 2009

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Let’s Identify This Euphorbia

While in the Cuban countryside, we came upon a number of very old cemeteries that always sat right next to the ocean. I was told that one cemetery dated back to 1919. How they managed to survive the hurricanes when so many homes with much more distance from the ocean haven’t is beyond me.

This particular type of euphorbia seemed to skirt the edges of all but one of them. That one was fenced by a much tougher euphorbia. This plant looks very similar to Poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) and I’ve been struggling to decide if it is or isn’t since our trip. Here’s a closer shot.

My argument FOR identifying it as Poinsettia are:

It gets very scraggly and vine-like when growing in tropical countries. Nothing like the potted plants North Americans display and then subsequently toss every holiday season.
Let’s compare. Here’s a picture I took in Mexico years ago. This particular plant was growing in the tended garden of someone’s backyard. Plants were being watered with hoses through the duration of our stay. So the difference here is a tended plant versus a plant that is left to fend for itself.
It was the dry season, which would account for extra straggliness.
It was growing in sand literally just off the beach. The beach was right on the other side of the cemetery. There were some trees providing a bit of shade but many plants were fully exposed. Let me tell you, it was HOT and the sun was punishing. That’s a lot for a poinsettia to take. They prefer a bit of shade coverage.
Look at the leaves and the little red bracts. They look right, albeit on the small side. But numbers 2, 3, and 4 could account for that.

My argument AGAINST identifying it as Poinsettia are:

I find it shocking to believe that poinsettia could survive that degree of extreme heat, sun and drought. See #4 (above).
There are gazillions of euphorbias in the world. I’ll admit my experience of them barely begins to cover the myriad of species out there. There is a very good chance that there is a plant very similar to poinsettia.
I am not an authority on poinsettias. I can barely stand the plant. Although I will say that I much prefer it growing wild and straggly. The cultivated potted varieties do little for me.

What do you think? Yay or nay?

Photo by Gayla Trail All Rights Reserved
As an aside, here’s another shot of the same cemetery. It was pretty incredible. Sigh. Let’s all get on a plane right now and go to Cuba together. I hear it’s warm there.