The Show Begins!

Happy Holidays from Costa Rica! Holiday traditions here are very different from where we came from in Pennsylvania. When we first arrived here back in December, 1997, I pined for the traditional winter wonderland scene with freshly cut evergreens, winterberry and holly. What we got at the hotel here was Santa and his scruffy plastic sleigh perched atop the roof of the hotel, while guests lounged under the blazing sun at the pool. Inside, the lobby featured artificial trimming and a dried out, brown cedar tree that looked more like a fire hazard than anything else. It was truly a surreal introduction to Christmas in the tropics.

We decided to go native and celebrate the holiday season like the locals, using the incredible flowering plants and trees, which begin blooming in December and continue all the way through the dry season until May, when the rainy season brings the green foliage back into center stage.

So, if we just look around the gardens at Finca El Tigre, we can find an absolute spectacle of color - pink and purple bougainvillea, red gingers, yellow trumpet vines, white orchid trees, multicolored frangipani and it goes on. It stopped raining about a week ago and the deciduous trees have begun dropping leaves. But the trees don’t go dormant like they do in the north. During the dry season, many of them burst into mouth-dropping blooms that cover the entire tree. The first time I saw the blazing, yellow Cortez Amarilla (Tabebuia ochracea), it nearly knocked me off my feet. Nothing prepares northerners for our first glimpse of a Tabebuia in full, big-bang bloom. But I digress and get ahead of myself. The Tabebuias won’t start for another few months yet.

Right now, this December 22nd, the Guachipelin trees (Diphysa Americana) are raining delightful yellow blossoms that look like sweet pea flowers. If you turn the blossom a certain way, it looks like a little bird (how easily we amuse ourselves). Along the fencerow, we have an avenue of Madero Negro trees (Gliricidia sepium) shaking off similar looking bird-like pinkish-blue flowers. Across the garden there are three dwarf Malinches (Caesalpiniacs.) with their elegant, floating red and yellow flowers. The yellow trumpets of the Vainillo trees (Tecoma stans) are brightening up the steep slopes and at the top, the huge Flame of the Forest trees (Spathodea campanulata) are ablaze with big orange clusters. The local kids use the waterlogged flower-buds as squirt guns. In the garden, there is an extravagance of color with mucho pickings for decorating the house- assorted Ixoras, hibiscus, heliconias, flowering vines and of course, the red bracts of the huge poinsettia shrubs. You know those potted poinsettia plants for sale during the Christmas season? In Costa Rica, they plant them out in the garden and they soon turn into big, gangly shrubs – always faithfully turning red again just in time for the holidays.

Some flowers have delightful fragrances and a few can be intoxicating, like the Ylang Ylang (Cananga odorata) and Jasmine trees at dusk. Everyone is out at dusk around the holidays, not just for the fresh, fragrant air, but because the sunsets are spectacular this time of year, producing incredible displays of color across the sky.

But December is just the beginning! During the dry season, flowering trees bloom successively week after week, giving everyone a different show as they drive down the same road.

At Finca El Tigre, the best show of all today is the massive expanse of Gallinazo (Schizolobium parahyba) and Guachipelin brightening up the forest canopy with greenish to yellow blossoms. Now that these trees have distinguished themselves amongst the rest of the canopy, we can see the huge Gallinazos down by the waterfalls and also how they have marched up the mountain over the years, trees not as massive, but just as bright when in bloom. During the rainy season the forest canopy features shades and textures of green. Now that the dry season has started, flowering trees will punctuate and brighten up the entire canopy.

Some good friends and Forestry Engineers, Manuel Viquez and Yamileth, designed an excellent website, which includes a section describing a flowering tree each week as Costa Rica goes through the flowering season. Check them out at http://www.elmundoforestal.com/ and look for the section called: “Los Arboles del Paraiso”. It’s done in Spanish but non-speakers can still enjoy the incredible pictures.