MEMORIES FOR THE FUTURE

YESTERDAY, Ms. Laborde's landscape butchers, returned to the neighborhood. This time to 'clean' the front yard of the abandoned house that yours truly managed for the
last two years without thanks from the jerks who live next door. The butchers are not
her own, she just hired them first.

This hicks left the soil bare. Tecoma stans, Cestrum diurnum, Turnera, Asparagus, Alocasia, Tradescantia, and the wonderful vine, Vitis vinifera that you can appreciate in the pictures to the right. I do not understand the rush, these feeble minded characters could have waited until the many bunches of grapes were ripe. After all
eating a Puercorican grape could only happen once in a lifetime. I had the chance from this exterminated vine.

This ignorant fools were not only paid, they were congratulated for the barbaric act accomplished..with the dreadful primitive machete. They finished with golden link, a blower! In a space less than 15 square feet. And every one...happy as a clam...

Now getting into the tittle.

When I was in third grade me mom used to take me to visit her friends in town or far away. In those days houses were mostly wooden. I remember
when the first ugly, match box concrete/cinder block house was built in our street. A huge event. At least 15 guys were involved, passing the buckets in Indian file through a ramp, to the roof, with the laughter and the noise of the cement mixer of those days.

But this is about plants. There were not many nurseries then. I can not
remember one. Gardening was a women thing. Housewives, spinsters or widows. Those with the skills required to propagate, diagnose and care for the plants were the envy of the uninitiated. Only the skills and imagination counted, since you could not go to buy plants as it is done now.

From the list that will appear below, Diffenbachia and Pothos were present in 7 out of ten houses, indoors. Pots then were anything available. But mostly cement, and metal oil/cracker cans. Puercorico,
was at the time a tobacco, coffee, sugar cane agricultural society. The connection with nature, soil was still around.

Allamanda cathartica
Aloe vera
Anthurioum
Spathiphylum
Alocasias
Hibiscus
Gardenia

I am sure that herbs, edibles were also planted in many houses, but that
required more knowledge, skills and will not get into that since the memories are not there.

This period of my life was marked terribly when witnessing the abrupt fast as hell destruction of that agricultural culture in the name of progress. The connection with Nature was lost for ever.

It was the beginning of the concrete/asphalt ERA. It started with highways,
hundreds of factories moved down from USA in search of cheap labor and not paying taxes of any kind.

The shot of grace was the concept of housing projects cookie mold like that Levitt and sons had developed in Long Island, New York and other places. Pendejismo paisajista, a concept I coined, was born. The house
came with postage stamp yards with turf/grass. Palms and hedges came later, following the image of those properties in USA.

After sixty years, in Puercorico, imagination, creativity in ornamental gardening/horticulture in general are dead. Twenty species or less in every possible context, wet or dry, cool or hot, mountain, seashore.

Perhaps that is why I remember with certain nostalgia, those childhood days. Memories then should be useful for the future. And that is that.