Cleanup time

It's amazing how things grow here -- and while we were away, they had a riot.

There were five of these seed stalks on the palms out front, for example. And though they're pretty on a rainy evening, glistening in the mist, they soon get messy, dropping dozens of tiny flowers from each of their hundreds of knobby little pods.

So down they came . . . and then we called Jon, our landscape guy, to bring his crew over to do the serious trimming.

So now the yellow elder is back to manageable size, primed to send out blossoms. The aralias are tied up, the buttonwood buzzed, the leaves raked and the thryallis that dropped their little yellow flowers into the pool pulled up and tossed out. The result: 25 huge bags of yard trash.

And then it rained. So we got wet getting new materials and putting them in, including a huge peace lily for a hole in the corner behind the pool, and some Tahitian gardenias for the gaps left by our sickly ground orchids, and some extra ferns. . . .

It seems that in his zealousness to keep everything fertilized, Robert burnt some of our stuff to a crisp. So I fired him and hired Jon to come back every month to fertilize and prune and make the jungle bloom.