Life Style & Travel

Annual Flowers For Cooler Weather

annual
UNITED STATES—All that unpleasant annual business of removing warm season vegetable plants to relinquish space for cool season vegetables applies to annual bedding plants too. Those of us who do not grow vegetables were spared the agony of pulling up tomato plants that might have still been producing a few tomatoes, just to make room for broccoli. Now, it...

Top Of The World

UNITED STATES—Six floors up at a high bar table al fresco, on top of a luxury department store in Calao, the legendary city's trendiest neighborhood. Here we travelers from America were among beautiful people, chatting, drinking beer and looking at other beautiful people as the dusking sun turned the skyline from gray to silver. I was worry free as I...

Fertilizer For The Last Time

fertilizer
UNITED STATES—For many of us, this might seem to be irrelevant. We do not apply fertilizer to our landscapes and gardens. Some of us who use fertilizer do so mostly for seasonal vegetable plants and flowering annuals. Such plants will either not be around long enough to get fertilized again this year, or are cool season plants that are...

Aporphobia Shrugged

UNITED STATES—People were so nice in Madrid. For instance, the women who had been talking to the Egyptian ambassador, had tapped me on the shoulder after the initial outbreak of conversation when we threaded our way into the auditorium at the Casa Árabe, and said, "I will introduce him to you, if you like. He is very interesting." Alas,...

Mediterranean Climates Are Something Special

climates
UNITED STATES—The climate here is pretty cool, at least in winter. Right now, it is pleasantly warm. It does not often get uncomfortably cold or hot, and when it does, it does not stay like that for too long. In between the warmest days of summer, the nights typically cool off nicely. In between the coolest nights of winter,...

Aporphobia At Last

UNITED STATES—Humblest apologies to the reader for our picaresque luncheons occupying the last column. You were left wondering about aporphobia, which lurks at the center of my Madrid experience. The digestion of we three travelers from America we was working away on croissant, milanesa and chicken wrap when we ventured toward the Central Park of Madrid, El Retiro. We didn't...

Hedges – Living In The Background

hedges
UNITED STATES—Pretty soon, as autumn weather starts to get cooler, some deciduous plants will develop brilliant color before defoliating for their winter dormancy. Throughout the rest of the year, evergreen plants with gold, silver, bronze, bluish, purplish, reddish or variegated foliage are more colorful than common green foliage is. A few deciduous plants with colored foliage turn different colors...

Aporphobia

UNITED STATES—In Hollywood, I ran into some French tourists and their children. One of the dads told me, "We feel good in Hollywood." I replied, "You come here to feel good, and I go to Paris to feel good." We laughed. Of course when I said that I was thinking really of Madrid, and those days in the end of...

Shade Can Be An Asset

shade
UNITED STATES—Just about every home garden has some sort of shade. Even if there are no substantial trees or shrubbery, there are northern walls of homes and garages, and they likely have eaves that extend their shadows a bit farther. Fences to the south create shade to the north. Gardens of modern homes are smaller, and surrounded by higher...

The Ducks Of Las Rozas

UNITED STATES—Off we went, five people piled in a car, to the round restaurant in the planned community of Las Rozas. Around the table were our host, a rock musician self named Dave America, to whom we owed this trip, his girlfriend Miriam, and the poet, Oscar Noviembre. I had translated a selection of his poems for our bilingual...