Boy, add a little water to a Florida yard and in no time you have what looks like an Amazonian rain forest. The kind of place that you fear to venture to far out as the weeds and the critters might just carry you away. Mostly the weeds.
My yard is in full bloom, and most of it is quite pretty. The firecracker plants in the front are little red refueling stations for two neighborhood hummingbirds, and the butterfly bushes are attracting their fair share of butterflies. I have pineapples on the pineapple plants, lemons on the lemon tree and the herbs in my daughter’s backyard garden (planted in an old timey, four-footed bathtub) smelling herby.
Much of it is paradise, but the rest was turning to jungle. A natural yard is both beautiful and bedeviling, especially when it rains.
Prolonged droughts can leave all-but the hardiest plants wilted and wounded. Ours are very hardy, and that just makes them more jumpy when the rains come. Steady and frequent rains make little plants, and other bits of green, stretch their spindly legs and venture out like bears after a long winter slumber. They start out slow, just testing the land, before rip-roaring out of the gate and swallowing up all in sight.
Now it has me venturing out more, dreading that I didn’t do more in the cool months so I wouldn’t haven’t to wage battle when it’s so hot, not to mention humid like a just-used gym sock.
You let a Florida yard get out of hand and it will push you around, steal from you, drink all your beer and clean out your checking account. It will swallow your house and teach your children how to gamble and spit.
So I’ve been weeding and whacking, tearing at roots and pulling up vines. Spraying when I have to, and chopping when I don’t. I’ve almost eradicated the potato vines and am close for the first time in the 10 years to conquering the cat’s claw.
This past weekend I went trimming. And trimming always seems to point up. Up as in into the trees, where you have to leave the ground and take gas-powered equipment that has sharp teeth that love to shred limbs, whether it’s the plant kind or your own.
My brother came over to help with one thing, and I drafted him for another: holding a wobbly aluminum ladder as I scaled to a height so dangerously high that I crossed into NASA’s jurisdiction. A tree was brushing the tip of my house, and I figured it needed a trim.
My brother is a bit of a daredevil, especially when he can do all the daring from the ground. He plants ladders at such angles that to climb them defies all laws of physics, and he motions from the ground to cut limbs that will surely take me with them.
“Just grab the power line if it comes down wrong,” he says.
I also trimmed grapefruit trees that had started growing wildly out of control, their thorns protruding from thick branches like daggers.
But even worse than thorns are the mighty, rotting grapefruit bombs that lurk high in the treetops. There are two kinds of grapefruit: the rock hard kind that can fall from a good 15-20 feet up and knock you unconscious, and the rotten-on-the-vine kind that some critter has gnawed its way through leaving little more than a decomposing fruit carcass that will kill you with its indescribably horrid smell.
These are often brown and mushy like pudding, and pungent like over-ripe vinegar. Get hit with one and you’ll rush yourself to the hospital demanding iodine scrubs and skin grafts.
With these two aerial threats, and a chain saw ripping away at spike-covered branches, you have to be at the top of your game and on constant lookout. It’s a veritable perfect storm of danger up there, and the dance you end up doing is best described as the cha-cha with a finger in a light socket.
And yet, I survived it all. There’s a pile of vegetative debris stacked up on the curb as tall as my house, and the yard has a semblance of order. Beauty minus the beast. And I’ll savor it for now because I know first rain storm, I’ll need to go out and do it all again.