By Victoria Torley

 

I like surprises, really, I do.

The other day, when I went into the greenhouse and found a bright green Parrot Snakes (genus Leptophis) coiled around my Catasetum orchid, did I scream? No. I hurried back into the house for a camera and called my husband to “Come see the beautiful snake!” The snake was just a surprise and held still long enough for a great picture.

When I saw a poison arrow frog on the vanilla orchid, did I worry? No. I just admired his bright red and blue body and left him to eat whatever poison arrow frogs like for lunch. Personally, I hope it is ants and slugs. And when I looked down to water some new seeds, I had to take a second look to recognize the ugly toad. What, me worry? If he likes ants and slugs, that will be a bonus.

Things surprise me all the time. The birds are helping. When we moved to Costa Rica, there were two black raspberry plants along the road. Now there are several hundred, all scattered by birds. There are so many that we give the plants away to anyone who wants fresh berries, and still have so many berries that I just had to bake three pies so I could clear out the freezer.

There are, however, unpleasant surprises. The other morning, my gardener and I went to the orchard to find that one of the mandarina trees had lost a branch – the fruit had become so heavy that it broke the branch, and the fruit wasn’t even all ripe. Very sad. Nothing to do but haul the branch away and dust the scar with cinnamon.

Dusting with cinnamon was another surprise and a very pleasant one. Who needs some chemical product that smells bad when you can dust with the ground-up bark of a tree?

Other unpleasant surprises? Well, how about a runaway cow that decides your driveway is the best place to spend the night (nothing like the dogs waking you at 3 a.m.)?

Or an entire herd of cows that decide that your half-grown corn is just what they need for added vitamins. Those are not my favorite surprises. Neither is getting up in the morning to find that a colony of leaf-cutter ants has stripped all the leaves from a hibiscus.
 

Surprises, pleasant and unpleasant, can keep you on your toes. Let’s hope that the good outweighs the bad in the long run.

Plant of the week.  Lovely bromeliads were flowering by the dozens in an isolated section of the forest on our property. Bromeliads are a family of plants of the pineapple family native to tropical America.

There are about 2,500 species and several thousand hybrids and cultivars. Many have brightly colored leaves, flowers or fruit. They range in size from moss-like species, from the tiny plants to the enormous 15-feet-tall Puya raimondii from the Andes.

They just go to show you that you should always have a camera with you because ‘Pura Vida’ can sneak up on you when you least expect it.

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Find more interesting stories about gardening in Costa Rica on the AM Costa Rica Garden Magazine. Questions on this article, Ms. Torley, gardener columnist, can be reached by emailing victoriatorley1@gmail.com
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