Trini Tuesday-

Trinidad is tropical so, as you'd imagine, the plant life is quite lush. To someone who grew up seeing everything go dormant in the winter even the dry season in Trinidad seems lush. Things in the tropics grow like crazy. Our yard had all sorts of fruit bearing trees and flowering plants and it amazed me. I have the black thumb of death when it comes to gardening so it was a lovely change to live somewhere that didn't have plants relying on skilled coaxing from me. Things more or less needed to be tamed instead. We had a hedge of hibiscus that started to get quite bushy and was threatening to consume the front wall and fence. We asked a friend how best to prune it and he offered to come do it for us. He showed up and worked hard and when he was done the bushes that had previously soared to 8 feet or more were now chopped down to just about waist level. Mr. Lime and I were standing there agape thinking surely these bushes would take years to recover from that sort of treatment. Our friend, who has been to the US a few times and had some idea of the differences in how our climates treat plant life laughed quite heartily and assured us that in a few months our bushes would need to be hacked mercilessly again. He was right. That bush I'm standing next to is one that had been lopped short just 6 months before the picture was taken. Hhhmm, oddly I had been a lot smaller 6 months before the picture was taken too....something about the tropics, I guess.

In addition to the hibiscus bushes we had cassava, various sorts of palm trees including a coconut palm, a lemon tree, the local version of a cherry tree (though the fruit was tasty it bore no resemblance to anything I'd call a cherry tree), a pomme cithere tree (this bears a sort of mango to pear shaped fruit with a very stringy pale flesh). And then there were the mango trees. For those of us from northern apple growing climates we are particular about what kind of apples we like to eat. Trinis, and I would suppose other tropical folks, are particular about the type of mango they want. In Trinidad, the Juli mango seems to be one of the favorites. Our trees were Juli mangoes. The neighborhood kids spent a lot of time at our house during Juli mango season! Given how many mangoes one tree produced and that we had 3 of them we told the kids to bring all their friends. We gave them away by the bagful and still had more than enough for ourselves. Diana loved getting sticky and gooey eating mangoes and I think she loved the tree because the fruit dangled right at her level as you can see.

Happy Trini Tuesday!