Tropical Gardening as War

Horticulturally speaking, living in the Caribbean was initially a disappointment for me. Upon our arrival, I marveled at our neighbors' lush, tropical gardens, with their elegant royal palms, fruit-laden trees, and intricate orchids barnacled atop mossy logs. Inspired, I dragged my husband to half the city's greenhouses and nurseries, stuffing our car with bags of soil and an ambitious variety of shrubs and plants. I soon learned that maintaining a garden in the tropics comes at a price; gardening in Santo Domingo means declaring war on both the climate and the resident pests.

Hunched over a tiny section of earth in my "yard" (which is actually just 2 cement parking spaces with a patch of unkempt grass between them - the grass is hidden by that large bush in the photo above) I encountered the first two very formidable foes of the tropical gardener: heat and humidity. Within 15 minutes I was sprawled on our sofa, the AC cranked up to 19 degrees, gulping down several glasses of water as roughly the same quantity of sweat poured down my face. OK, I thought, maybe I should wait until early in the morning to continue.
By 8:00 am it was already a humid 75 degrees, so I set to work immediately. With my gleaming hand-held hoe and spade, I began to tear out the weeds from the tiny patch of earth under a guava tree to make room for my birds of paradise, sitting patiently next to me on the sidewalk, roots wrapped snugly in black plastic. I waved a lavender garden-gloved hand breezily at a passing neighbor, and then I tore out a particularly difficult clump of weeds. Immediately I noticed that the ground around the gaping hole left beneath it seemed to be moving. Absently, I also noticed that a psychedelic pattern seemed to be swirling crazily across my newly purchased gardening gloves, but it wasn't until a burning sensation spread from my bare wrists up to my elbows that I realized I'd met the Caribbean garden's third foe: red ants.
You can probably imagine my reaction, when, in a moment of Loony-toon like theater, I shrieked, hysterically threw off the gloves and flung the spade, and staggering to the water spigot, trampled my lovely, innocent birds of paradise.
An hour later, after I'd showered and the sensation of tiny, imaginary insects creeping along my skin had more or less passed, I returned to the battlefield. Hundreds of ants erupted from the still-gaping hole, swarming over my crumpled gloves and broken birds of paradise. Sullen and defeated, I turned toward the house. As if to simultaneously warn me against future attempts at gardening and reward the conquering army, a rotten guava fell from the tree and exploded on the ground behind me, suggestively splattering bright red juice on my gloves and gardening tools.

So gardening isn’t my thing, I thought, and surrendered my garden to the elements. The weeds took over; the ant army resumed patrolling the ground around the guava tree, all undisturbed by me. My gardening gloves, a pitiful monument to my defeat, remained undisturbed.

Eventually, however, I even had to abort my apathy for tropical gardening when my untidy cube of concrete, razor-wire and bristly, savage grasses became a warren for both the local mosquito population and a prolific rat family that took up residence in the bushes hanging over our perimeter wall (and I do mean prolific: we had almost “Big Brother”-like access to their love lives from our living room and dining room windows). With both dengue fever and the bubonic plague on my mind (yes, I am a bit of an alarmist, I admit) we hired a gardener to come monthly to raze the sanctuary-lending weeds and hack away the errant vines and shrubs that creep over our wall from the neighbors’ gardens. Next, facilities maintenance kindly placed child-proof rat poison dispensers in strategic locations. By degrees, the mosquitoes retreated, the rats succumbed.

Scene of the crime.

In the end, I vanquished many of my gardening foes (although I still give the ant hill a wide berth). So, for now, I bid thee farewell from my (nearly) ant- and mosquito-free bunker in Santo Domingo.