Gardens > Articles > Caribbean Gardens

Sitting out on a veranda in the Caribbean you can almost hear the overwhelming, relentless fertility. An untended lawn looks out of control in a week, with sprouts a foot tall, and trees can reach 60 feet within a decade. Growth is reckoned to be about three times that of the temperate zones. It’s enough to put a gardener in a panic.

“It’s a bit like living in a huge greenhouse,” says Ole Dam Mikkelsen, a tulip farmer from Denmark who has lived in Barbados for the last 14 years. He has created a garden that would probably have taken forty to grow in Europe. Ranged around the veranda, his lawn has islands of shrubs and trees; neatly trained crotons, a sweep of ixora in different colours and a trio of coconut palms curving up from an intermeshed root system. Behind the house is a border like a theatre set, its foreground dashed with red, yellow and blue of flowering bushes against a backdrop of a hundred greens.

Barbados is an interesting case. Where so many of the islands are volcanic (some, like Montserrat, still active of course) and are mantled in botanical pandemonium, Barbados has a limestone base with a relatively thin soil. But its gardens - plantation house gardens and hotel gardens - are beautifully kept and are particularly impressive. Even the smallest wooden ‘chattel house’ has a garden: a colourful barricade of shrubs guarding it from the roadway and flowering plants that line the wooden walls.

The island has an active Horticultural Society, which has exhibited at Chelsea for the last ten years and during the winter season it has an Open Gardens programme, organised by Jean Robinson of the Horticultural Society.

Robinson has divided her own garden into ‘rooms’ separated by borders of shrubs - mussaenda with pink and red blooms, allamandas in a whole range of colours and the white balls of spirea, or bridal wreath - all in the shade of huge trees. She has cultivated a small water garden in a ‘taitch’, a large copper boiler used in Barbados’s sugar industry in centuries past.

Visitors often ask her when the Caribbean winter is. There isn’t one really, though the onward botanical march slows up for the few months of the dry season, between December and April. This is the flowering time and so gardeners cut back in November in preparation for it - it coincides quite neatly with the tourist high season and so the hotel gardens are at their best for winter visitors. Plants turn their leaves too - just before Christmas the poinsettia turns red and Snow on the Mountain begins to turn white. A few plants such as bougainvillea and shrimp plants (which bloom with tiny yellow pagodas) flower all year-round, but island gardeners complain that their season is actually quite short.

But there is huge variety in the islands. Gardeners also use crotons, hardy bushes with a million variegations in purple, yellow and green, heliconias, for their slender stems and banana-like leaves, and also flowering trees (which often bloom later in the year). In the shade they can grow ferns, whole swathes of lustrous green free-standing leaves called elephant ears, bromeliads and philodendra. In sunnier, drier areas (often in their own micro-climates just a few miles away on the leeward side of the island) they plant succulents and even cacti.

Almost every Caribbean island has a botanic garden of some sort and although most are now no longer propagating, many still their old function as parks. Barbados’s best known garden however, Andromeda, was actually a private garden which was given by its creator Iris Bannochie to the Barbados National Trust. Consequently it has a very informal style, spilling down a hillside on the Atlantic coast with sections divided between limestone boulders. Andromeda is particularly known for its heliconias.

In centuries past, each Caribbean estate house had its domestic garden. On a walk in the tiny island of Nevis (once almost entirely cultivated with sugar, but now returned to jungle), we came to the foundations of a plantation house hidden in 50 years of overgrowth. Even after this time, the remains of the old medicinal and spice garden were visible: cinnamon, limes, ‘seville’ orange, bamboo, soursop.

In the same way, every small home in the Caribbean has always kept some vegetables and a fruit tree (usually a lime, but also other citrus). Traditionally the ‘yard’, an area of compacted earth, is surrounded by ‘galvanise’ (corrugated tin) or even closely grown cactus, and shaded by a mango, avocado or bay tree. Pigeon peas and sorrel are planted so that they bloom at Christmas time.

The succulent aloe, with its explosion of fleshy leaves, is still used as a balm after sunburn (and widely in cosmetics of course), but its viscous, bitter sap was used locally as a shampoo and as a means of preventing babies from sucking their thumb. Its larger counterpart, the agave or century plant, like a tank-trap, can still be seen used as a washing line, with the clothes hung on the huge spikes. Almost anything goes: coconut husks have been used as floor scrubbers.

There is a long tradition of using local plants in medicine and this continues in the less developed islands. ‘Bush teas’ made from lime and soursop and other less known plants are made against anything from fever to period pains. This is an area of Caribbean life closely connected with obeah, as local black magic is known, because bush doctors often doubled as obeah-men.

As in so many spheres, it is the plain difference between temperate and tropical that makes Caribbean travel fun - the newness and unexpected variety of exotic plant life. Caribbean flowers have an amazing intensity of colour - I suppose they have to be bright to stand out in the tropical sun - and then the very appearance of some of the tropical flowers and fruits can be a surprise.

Their names express it best: powder-puff, cannon-ball tree, shame a lady, lobster-claw, bird of paradise and red hot cat-tail. Surely, though the best name of all is given to sansevieria hyacinthoides, which grows in a green gaggle of twisted leaves, standing erect like snakes. All over the Caribbean, it is known as ‘mother-in-law’s tongue’.

Articles

• More from James Henderson
• More on the same theme