nature is ancient

The botanical garden in Puerto Viejo is a magical place. I could have spent the entire day there. A young European boy was volunteering the day we visited. He walked us over to a tree and told us to scrape the bark and describe the smell. “Mmmm, sweet smelling,” I said. He asked us to guess what it was. “It smells like tea,” I said. “Is it….licorice?” my hon asked. “It’s cinnamon!” cute European boy said. He explained how they cut sheets of the tree bark off and let them dry into the sun, and then they curl them up into cinnamon sticks. I’ve always wondered why cinnamon sticks look like that! (When we got back home, we threw a couple of cinnamon sticks into a cup of Costa Rican rum with a pat of butter and heated that baby up on the stove. What a treat!)



Then he walked us over to the bromeliad nursery where the farm grows 50 different types of varieties. Pineapples, which grew in a different area of the garden, are a type of bromeliad. It takes a whole year to grow a mature pineapple, but by the magical powers of chemicals, commercial plantings are forced into maturity so that executive at Dole can get very rich by growing fruit all year long and poisoning your family. Piña colada, anyone?



Bromelaids collect water in their leaves, which attracts the poison dart frogs. The frogs come to the nursery to lay their eggs and they stay around to protect the eggs until it’s hatching time. At our feet, dozens of tiny neon red frogs hopped along.



After the nursery, we walked through a medicinal garden where clumps of fragrant lemon grass and ginger root were growing. Each plant had a sign on it explaining its name, origin and medicinal purpose. Noni, which we later tasted, is used to aid in digestion, treat cancer and diabetes, and put on skin wounds and burns. This part of the garden made me very interested in researching natural remedies for ailments. Suddenly, rubbing a chemical goo squeezed from a vinyl tube onto my scrapes and burns seemed so foreign to me. Indians have been using natural remedies for thousands of years and it works for them, Mr. Corporate Chemical Maker!



Next, we strolled through a beautiful rainforest. We learned that fig trees propagate only when the seeds from the figs are eaten and pooped out by an animal. The figs that drop to the ground never establish roots on their own. This is nature’s clever strategy to avoid competition from its offspring and ensure that its seed can be carried further from where its host is growing. Lots of gigantic colorful birds were flying above us. One of the small birds called the white collared manikin makes a snapping sound, like a branch breaking, with its wings.



The sound was so frequent that we kept checking above our heads to make sure a coconut wasn’t falling on us. I just knew I’d get knocked out by a coconut sooner or later. Ideally, this would happen simultaneously as I slipped on a banana peel, but no such luck.

The vanilla and black pepper crops were surprisingly not fragrant. The living plant of the vanilla doesn’t actually have an aroma. It needs to flower and then the pods mature and fall off and turn brown before you can open the pod and whiff that amazingly sweet smell. The pepper vines take two years to produce any corns of pepper. The immature corns are harvested as green pepper and the mature ones, which take another year, are harvested into black pepper. And to think, all my life I thought it grew in tiny, pre-printed convenient packages!