Treelets, tree ferns, and bamboo
Anna:
Does this drawing look
like an artist's flight of fancy? It's not. Costa Rica was
chock full of treelets.
A treelet is technically
any woody plant that's too tall to be a shrub but too short to be a
tree. Non-technically, the term is often used to refer to woody
plants that grow like palm trees with one main trunk supporting an
unbranched canopy. To my eye, treelets look odd, but they are
common in many rainforests.
Other unique shrubs
abounded at the elevation of the cloud
forest. Tree
ferns are pretty much identical to treelets, except that the species
are ferns instead of flowering plants. I fell in love with the
octopus-like unfurling fronds at the top of tree ferns in Australia,
and 
drew
them with great abandon there. In Costa Rica, I'd gotten a bit
used to tree ferns and only made one quick sketch. (The photo at
the bottom of the page is also a tree fern.)
Finally, no discussion
of unique Monteverde shrubs would be complete without mentioning
bamboo. Unlike treelets, bamboo is familiar to most of us, so the
plants don't strike us as strange. But bamboo is actually a grass
stretched up into the subcanopy. How much stranger can you get?
After three weeks of
living in a bed and breakfast, we decided to move into a house for the
remainder of our stay. Flipping through my journals, my reasoning
is unclear --- I call our new living situation "a big, expensive 
house",
so clearly we weren't saving much money. But the house was in
Monteverde proper rather than in Cerro Plano, so it shortened our daily commute to the
Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve. I suspect that after packing my
bags daily or weekly for ten months, I was also just itching to settle
down somewhere. As you'll read in later posts, though, moving
wasn't quite as simple as making the decision and changing addresses.
Maggie:
3-20-01
Of course some of the
initial glamor of Monteverde has worn
old. No longer do we walk along the paths beside the road. We walk
down the roads like the locals. But no matter what, having a kitchen
sounds good. I am looking forward to doing my own shopping and
dishes.
The house is a bit
too much for us. Our plan is to eat simply and live in a huge,
overly huge house. It has a living room, a kitchen, a fireplace,
three bedrooms, two bathrooms. Much more than our childhood house,
or any necessities of two healthy women.
Want
to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the
RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed.
