Vivero

After a full day of sightseeing and swimming in the ocean and at a mountain waterfall, we stopped at a vivero - plant nursery, literally 'place of life' - on our way home to buy a few fruit trees.

I’d worked up a careful list with Marcos as to what would grow best on our finca. Since I leave in a few days for Oregon, Pecos will take care of the potted trees for now. Marcos will plant them in mid-April, about the same time that Pecos returns to the U.S.

Oh my, the prices! I’d planned to buy just a few trees, in order to give our finca orchard a head start this year. Sweet orange, grapefruit or lemon trees, five feet tall, just $2. Avocado trees, one dollar and a little change. And acidos, a tart lemon-lime, even less than that. We bought two or three of each of these: sweet orange, oranges for juice, avocados, mangos, acidos, water apples, guava, guanabana, starfruit. Marcos has papaya trees and yucca shrub-trees for us and starts of sugar cane and flowering bushes. The Kid has given us ginger roots.

This open-air vivero lies along the highway and encompasses the equivalent of one city block. No greenhouses are needed as overhead palms and flowering trees provide shade in some areas. Like many other businesses, the office of the vivero is three-sided with a tin roof.

We walked under huge fronds of tree-size ferns and appropriately-named umbrella trees. Ten-inch orange flowers jutted out from ginger shrubs that were taller than us, and 3-ft. strands of bright red helonia flowers dangled from overhead vines. Orchids in all colors sprang from moss-filled baskets and hanging baskets of ferns had fronds four to six-ft. across.

Our fruit trees were loaded in wheel barrows and brought to our vehicle where each was carefully fitted in – somehow. Pecos and my daughter were up front and I squeezed into the back seat, surrounded by a jungle-tangle of foliage. I was elated, having waited until just before my departure for the U.S. to purchase our trees of fruit.

Marcos has cleared a gentle slope for the fruit trees and an area for a small garden. Flowers and herbs will later fill an area about 20-ft. wide that curves around our porch and from there will cascade down a six-ft. slope in two tiers.

All of this is envisioned and will take at least a few years to come to fruition as imagined – where meandering paths take one past colorful flowers that bloom overhead and under and on the branches of small trees and shrubs. Each planting and improvement to our finca increases its worth – to us and to whoever has it after we are gone. 