Category: Trees

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Pura Vida Gardens

After checking in my jungle hotel Thursday, I drove 6 km up the dirt road to a beautiful garden:

La hermosa Pura Vida Jardin:

 

Gardens carved out of the rainforest, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and threatening rain, near my hotel on a dirt road
buena vista

 

Miles of paved or maintained trails with every tropical plant imaginable!
sendero del jardín

 

You know you are still in the jungle! Technically it is the last remaining
“Transitional Rainforest” in the Americas, transitioning from the dry forests
of Guanacaste and the montane forests near Atenas to the lowland rainforests.
selva de transición
What I hope my “Maraca Plant” will look like in a year or two!
Also called “Shampoo Ginger” or in Spanish  plantas jengibre
But local Ticos call it the Maraca Plant which is the name I’m using.

 

And hoping I get several blooms like this next year!
flores jengibre

 

Many unknown to me flowers like this and too many to show here!
Desconocido para mí

 

A Water Hyacinth like we had in The Gambia
Eichhornia crassipes

 

One of the many Heliconias like I have in my yard
My blooms are dying out now and will return
in the dry season I’ve been told.
Heliconia L. es un género que agrupa
más de 100 especies de plantas tropicales
On the edge of Carara National Park just like my hotel grounds. Tomorrow’s post!
Parque Nacional Carara
And a view of Manantial de Agua Viva Waterfalls, one of tallest in Costa Rica.
I was going to hike to bottom, but decided safer to not do it solo! Maybe later!
The Pura Vida Gardens website with short video clip: http://www.puravidagarden.com/

 

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.
~Rumi
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House Wren?

Well, actually it is a Rufous-naped Wren who happened to come inside my house!

Rufous-naped Wren, Atenas, Costa Rica
(On the back of the couch in my living room! Looking out the screen window.)
Rufous-naped Wren, Atenas, Costa Rica
Making himself at home on a drink coaster. This is what happens with doors left open.

Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell; they sing among the branches.

~Psalm 104:12 ESV 

Rufous-naped Wren, Atenas, Costa Rica
Singing outside my window in the Strangler Fig Tree

See also my Costa Rica Birds Photo Gallery.
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Guarumo Cecropia Tree in Symbiotic Relationship with Ants

Guarumo Cecropia tree in my front yard

Guarumo leaves are some of the most interesting in the tropics.

When my personal gardener told me the Guarumo tree would attract Toucans with the seeds, I told him I wanted one! And I have it! It grows naturally only in Central America and is one of several kinds of Cecropia trees. I panicked this week when I saw a stream of tiny ants crawling up and down the trunk of the tree and called Cristian for help! He stopped by after another job today and explained that this ant is the friend of this tree. They help each other in a symbiotic relationship, providing food and housing for the ants who in turn protect the tree from leaf-eating predators. It was also used by Amerindians for medicinal purposes and is now used by pharmaceutical companies.

All of the cecropia trees are the favorite food of sloths, so you most often see photos of sloths in large cecropia trees, but not usually the Guarumo though. Mine will have to be a lot larger to hold either a toucan or sloth! Right now it is just a special kind of symbiotic ants! It not only looks cool, but is a great lesson in working together with smaller, sometimes hated creatures!

A sustainable world means working together to create prosperity for all.
~Jacqueline Novogratz

And by the way, I just this moment realized that today is my 6 month anniversary in Costa Rica! I moved here December 24, 2014. I’m glad I came! Maybe I will eventually figure out a symbiotic relationship with Costa Rica.  🙂

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Sailor’s Delight?

“Red sky at night, Sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning.”
Last nigh’t sky from west end of my balcony through the trees.

 

Last night’s sky from the driveway above my roof a few minutes later.

Well, sure enough, it did not rain yesterday and has not so far today and it is after 4:00! I have to go water the new plants! I was enjoying the rainy season shower every afternoon! But regardless, I’ll keep my new trees and flowers alive with hose water!  🙂  And then look at this beautiful image:

 

And looking northwest toward Central Atenas a gorgeous pink & blue!
I love seeing what God creates!
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.   ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I walk in beauty!

Frangipani (or Plumeria) tree in Alajuela.

Beauty is before me.  

Beauty is behind me
Beauty is above me
Beauty is below me


I walk in beauty!

         – Navajo Poem


All of nature is beauty to me and in Costa Rica I feel like I am surrounded by nature more than anywhere else I have ever been. And as a walker, I truly walk in beauty! (You see more walking!)

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House Tour – Outside Today

Here’s a few views of the outside of my house and some of the new plants I got today. Tomorrow I will show the inside rooms.

My favorite room in the house is actually outside, my balcony, deck, patio.
This tile floor is throughout the house and outside walkways around three sides.
Nice! Plus the wooden ceiling is throughout the house.

105 Calle Roca Verde, one of the few houses in Atenas with a house number!
I’m the house on right behind trees, Don & Linda to left with carport and
our landlord lives on top of the hill behind us. I guard the gate, ha, ha!
There is also a gate to get inside the development with a real guard 24/7.

View of my house from street. The three little decorative palms in front were
added today to replace the three that died from lack of water in dry season.
I plan to make watering plants a major dry season activity!
You can barely see the Red Palm planted at end of balcony &
a tall, skinny Guarumo Tree in front of balcony.

You have already seen my new entry garden, but
we planted ground cover today that should spread fast.

Three Fishtail Palms and a Banana Plant (on right) were planted today as a screen
in front of my bedroom window (right) and guest room (left) for privacy
on this street side. They will fill in and spread in a month or two.
And maybe I’ll be eating the bananas by Christmas!  🙂
The driveway and entry side. The entry hall is to left by garden, but I mainly
use the balcony at right as my main entrance. This may be the least interesting
side of house, but my new entry garden is going to change that! Pot plants on
this wall would block the tile walkway, except maybe at that corner on patio.
I’m making it my home and so for love it inside and out! It is just right for me.

Tomorrow I’ll show you around inside the house as it is now decorated. My art may arrive this week, but I will probably add only a few pieces around a well decorated house! Buenas Noches!

Tonight’s sunset colored the clouds in the north. Beautiful! Each evening a new surprise!
How did I ever live without a balcony? This is my cathedral!
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Unprepared for First Rain

Yellow Bells Trees Shedding Blooms
Sunny Sidewalk in Atenas

I walk in the sunshine under the Yellow Bell trees for a late lunch and early dinner out to try the ribs at the Don Yayo Chicharonerra Cafe. Beautiful day with some rain clouds in the sky like we’ve had for weeks with no rain, so of course it will not rain. Well, while eating we got our first rain of the year (not counting one little shower) and it was a “gully washer” as we would say back in Arkansas. I took a photo but rain doesn’t seem to show up in my photos. The streams and canyons were gushing as I walked home.

We were very dry and having grass fires, so we really needed the rain! But it was so unexpected that I left my apartment windows open AND my laundry drying out on the balcony! Guess what? Some floors got mopped and my clothes went back through the spin cycle with hopefully some sun tomorrow. This is a case for the electric dryer in my new house and almost reason enough by itself for the move!  🙂   Can hardly wait!

Then after clean up of the rain, I got this “After the Rain” photo of rain fog on the horizon. Hope I get as many photo ops from the new balcony! I just love nature, even in the middle of a town.

“After the Rain” from my balcony, Hacienda La Jacaranda, Atenas, Costa Rica
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Ripening Mangoes & Coffee Research

The most eaten fruit in the world!
This tree has red or purple ones, while some are turning yellow or orange.
Shot from my balcony, Hacienda La Jacaranda, Atenas, Costa Rica

One website lists 4 different cultivars of mangoes in Costa Rica:

I believe my photo above is of the Tommy Atkins variety (purple). On the property here (formerly a mango farm) there is at least one other variety or cultivar. It is turning yellow & orange which I think is the Hayden. A lot of the different varieties were developed in Florida, trying to create year around crops. 

This Ojochal blog declares Mango “King of the Fruit World” listing health benefits and describing the 4 cultivars.

Nature’s Pride (a distributor) has lots of recipes and some “How to Prepare” videos

This “Fruit of the Month” article has a couple of mango recipes.

I have been eating a mango a day recently and keep a bottle of mango pulp in the frig for making one of four smoothie-type fruit drinks I have at least one of every day: mango, guanabana, mora (blackberry), and pina (pineapple). The mangoes that fall from the trees are bruised on one side and I cut that side off before eating the rest of it. I can get better ones in the market that aren’t bruised but were picked ripe or near-ripe. There is nothing better than a tree-ripened mango! I said the same thing when I lived in The Gambia.

And by the way – I signed the contract on the rental house Tuesday. Move a week from Thursday, 23 April. The virtual tour of my new house is still on the Realtor’s site for now. It will be taken down eventually.

And for you STARBUCKS COFFEE LOVERS: Starbucks Costa Rica Coffee Research Farm is
supposedly trying to help coffee growers raise disease-resistant coffee plants IF they will sell to Starbucks at ridiculously low prices – American ingenuity or greed? Coffee farmers have to eat too!

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Caring for Nature

Celebrate Your Life
Care for Nature

I recently noticed this sign nailed to a tree in Central Park Atenas below some air plants. Costa Ricans are known for celebrating and enjoying life! And the country is a haven for nature unlike most others. Maybe someone put this sign here to educate the youth who hang out in the park a lot, since many of them are more interested in things than nature. As a nature-lover I’m glad to see it anyway.

The government and tourism leadership are working to make Costa Rica one of the “greenest” tourist countries in the world. Maybe now they will work harder on educating the local people concerning littering and misuse of things like the greywater I wrote about earlier. There is not much they can do about volcanic ash, but at least it is fairly rare with some volcanoes erupting only every 400 years. All of these little environmental concerns are important because together with the daily destruction of forests by man’s hunger for wood, land, and “progress,” we are systematically destroying the world that God made for us. The “care for nature” is still minimal in our world, even in Costa Rica. May we all celebrate life by caring for nature!

Now this good news as it was reported in “Costa Rica Insider” one of the newsletters I get:

100% renewable energy

More exciting news recently out of Costa Rica. The country’s electric utility company, ICE (Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad) announced that during the first 75 days of 2015, the country had been running completely on renewable energy resources—with no burning of fossil fuels needed to generate electricity. The primary source is hydroelectric (Lake Arenal was actually created to power a hydroelectric plant), followed by geothermal (all that volcanic activity underground comes in handy), wind, and a good bit of solar, too.
Costa Rica has set an ambitious goal of being completely carbon neutral for its power generation by 2021. And it already generates more than 90% of its power on average through renewable sources.
Ticos and expats are psyched. And the achievement has also attracted attention from environmental watchers and media organizations from around the world.

“We cannot think too highly of nature, nor too humbly of ourselves.”

Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)
 

 

“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.” 

 

― Chris Maser, Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest

 

 

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Cashew Fruit

Cashew Fruit is ripening on trees around Atenas now.
Photographed from my balcony, Hacienda La Jacaranda, Atenas, Costa Rica

This shot was made from about 50 meters away on a tree in a neighbor’s yard, shot from my balcony! The fruit reminds you of a red or yellow (come in both colors) bell pepper except for the seed or nut that hangs below it. Only one nut per fruit. No wonder cashews are somewhat expensive. Read about them in this Wikipedia article. New uses for the fruit itself are being developed, including one by Pepsi Cola. It is not a major export from Costa Rica. They grow in most tropical climes and we even had them in The Gambia. Most of what you get in the states probably come from India, Indonesia or Nigeria, where they are big exports. We stick with exporting bananas, pineapples, and coffee here!