The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got a friend, Green Thumb Barry, who has an incredible garden and arboretum over on the east side of the island, plenty of sun, lots of compost and chicken manure, everything plants love. He grows exotic stuff. A banana tree stands near his cabin, even has small bananas some years. Sure, he wraps it in the winter. I know we live on the banana belt but even they need protection in the monsoons. You walk around his grounds and you spend half your day asking what is that little flower or that strange shrub or this odd fruit out in the orchard. He plants South American root crops, Australian ferns, white kiwi, hybridized peonies, rare irises and unusual rhododendrons. The place is riotous with flowers and foliage. Yesterday I was tripping through the tulips, photographing what I’d never seen before and he wondered out loud why he went to all this trouble.

“Whaddaya mean?” I asked, bent over shooting some delicate little bloom I asked the name of but forgot immediately.

“Nobody ever sees this,” he said glumly. “What good is it if no one comes here?”

I capped my camera and stood up. Vines hung from overhead on trees he’s planted long ago. Hummingbirds scrabbled in the Chilean fire tree that was living up to its name with a thousand deep orange flowers that drew them to its nectar. Bees buzzed and birds yammered, practically his own temperate jungle, arboretum and nursery all in one. The living roof of his his new greenhouse was even blooming, everything fecund and spreading as far as we could see. Maybe Adam and Eve felt like Barry. All that paradise and no visitors. Kind of a living hell, I guess Barry would think.

“You kidding me?” I asked and he shook his head sadly. “What’s the point? I’m the only person who sees this most of the time. Look at this,” he said and under a tree peony I could just barely see a delicate little striated frond with a tall spike of yellowish flowers starting to open. “Nobody will ever see this. Just me. ”

I said, “I don’t know, Barry, you want to sell tickets, start a garden show, set up as a nursery? You got kind of a paradise going here, enjoy it.” Barry just muttered and shook his head. Maybe Eve felt the same way, took a bite of the snake’s apple and figured it might change her luck. I guess it did. Might have been easier to change your way of thinking, seems like to me. Paradise is hard to find for a reason, apparently.

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