Going to seed

Brantley and Steve were busy installing firestops today -- those short horizontal boards half-way up the spaces between studs on a wall. Important, but not very photogenic.

So I thought I'd mention that Patricia, the really sweet next-door neighbor at our rental, gave us eight of these palm trees -- Christmas palms.

Actually, the one in the picture we've owned for some time; it's right outside the front door of our house-in-progress. The ones Patricia gave us are about nine inches tall, offspring from one of her Christmas palms.

The profusion of seeds on these things is one reason why she can be so generous. After the little green buds flower (male and female on the same plant), the fruits ripen, turn bright red (hence the name) and fall, and then the little buggers sprout like weeds.

They're incredibly popular as landscape palms. Beautifully shaped, they require no pruning -- "self-cleaning," in palm parlance, because dead fronds break away cleanly on their own. They're the same kind that plop into our rental pool, but at least you don't have to shinny up to trim off the dead parts, and a falling frond doesn't pack the same wallop as a falling coconut.

(There are more than 2,000 species of palms, by the way. Patricia's also a whiz at raising arecas, the kind often sold as house plants.)

I did have to ask our landlord Steve to borrow another neighbor's saw-on-a-stick to cut the flower stalks on the four Christmas palms clustered over our pool: A frond I can pull out easily enough, but I don't want to skim thousands of little flowers from the surface, or collect thousands of seeds from the bottom.