June is the season when my garden - indeed much of Miami - becomes a sea of fire, when, like the finale at a spectacular fireworks festival, the whole sky becomes ablaze with Royal Poinciana trees in full bloom. These enormous trees, with trunks up to four feet thick, forty feet high and canopies 60 or 70 feet across, their plumelike leaves with thousands of tiny leaflets all fallen now and replaced with tens of thousands of brilliantt scarlet blooms, until the entire canopy is one solid mass of flaming red. No wonder it's called in the Caribbean, where it's a native, I believe, the Flame Tree, or Flamboyant.

I planted six of these flamboyant giants in my garden several decades ago, pulling them from an overgrown abandoned jungle down the street where an old recluse had once lived and died in his tiny, dilapidated, rotting home. It was the rainy season, and when I finally reached these beauties, from the rain-soaked, jungle floor I was able to pull out ten seedlings, all ten to 12 feet tall, with little effort. Loading them into my bright yellow supervan, I delivered several to people who'd lost to cultivation and disease all their Caribbean slash pines.

Of the remaining six, I planted two, then "parked" the other four in shady places in my yard. They all survived, and most of them have grown to enormous size.

Their colors vary slightly, from an orangey red (there is in fact a variety, rather rare, which is pure orange) to a deep scarlet. The largest of mine, and the latest bloomer, which towers over my house, is the reddest of all, and every afternoon, after every thundershower, it rains down red petals until the lawn beneath looks like a bright red carpet.

There I picked up, freshly fallen, this six-petalled bloom, the only one with a yellow, white and splotched purple petal in it that occurs in every bloom cluster (in which all the other flowers have six all-red petals.) Perhaps the mass of red in each bloom cluster attracts insects, while this one with the single yellow and white with purple splotches invites them to the one with sweetest nectar and most pollen?

Like the purple water hyacinth I captured on my scanner, I made this image by placing the fallen bloom directly on the scanner, with the lid propped up just enough to keep from crushing its fragile petals and stamens -- though you can see some white filaments from the stamens that were knocked down on the petals. If you look closely, you will see a few drops from the rain.

This fellow was no fabulous medieval monster like Sir Gawain met in King Arthur's castle. I just now met him face to face, eyeball to eyeball, right here in my green acre beneath my 60-foot-tall strangler fig. But I, and he, were hunkered down on the ground. I, sitting on the ground in an enormous bed of bright green wart ferns, behind rows of bright orange-and-yellow lantanas full of zebra butterflies, orange jasmine shrubs in full bloom and perfume, and, behind a large lemony-scented crinum lily, was about to saw down the last of six tropical almond saplings -- dazzling displays of huge red leaves when touched by cold, but otherwise a mass of unwanted foliage, so out they go!

I sat there staring at this last sapling, the smallest, just an inch in diameter, when I noticed a grey-green second trunk on it, and then a bright green head on that, with a white band between its upper and lower jaws, like the hinged sections of a knight's helmet?, then a dark green body, with a bright white sash over his chest and shoulders.

Or was it a she? Except for its darker, more bark-like back, this monster looked exactly like the Cuban giant crown anole shown above in the photo by a Duke herpetologist on his wonderful web page that displays and describes some fifty-odd sub-tropical lizards called "anoles." (at http://www.duke.edu/~jsr6/Herppics/Anolequest.jpg

Well, there we two were in the shade of my green jungle, eyeball to eyeball, only a foot or two away: he (or she?) frozen stock-still as these giant anoles will, to avoid detection and capture; and I, stunned by my sudden close encounter with such a huge, exotic dragon (this one not full grown yet?, only 9 or 10 inches long, but truly splendid.

Suddenly I was seized, like the young Apollo about to spear a lizard in the Greek bronze I had recently written about, with an urge to capture this beauty. I made a grab at it with my bare hand, but the lizard suddently came to life and leaped over my hand up over my shoulder and onto my back. I reached up behind me to grab hold of him, but he leaped off into the air and into the dense green bed of wart ferns in the shade of the towering strangler fig.

So I went inside and went online, to track him down, to google him.
And there he was, with his Latin name, Anolis equestris, the Knight Anole.

This glorious late spring afternoon, I picked up barrels of twigs from live oaks & royal poinciana trees from winter's last winds and spring's first storms, and then went down into the swimming pool to sweep up a last small pile of soggy leaves.

With rake and broom and an empty trash barrel I walked down into the pool, which has been empty now for several years except for a foot or two of ground water that seeps in and stays at the low end -- more or less level with the water table, which must be only five or six feet underground.

The water's always murky & mucky, due to dust & debris and rotting leaves, and a large mass of hydrilla or some sort of long grassy waterplant that thrives in it. So do huge marine toads and tiny tree frogs, whose booming chorus at mating season reverberates in the vast ampitheatre of the largely empty pool. Due to cool days now the frogs haven't really cranked up yet. But in last week's heat and rain, some must have got spring fever, because down at the water's edge this afternoon I noticed the water teeming with thousands of tiny tadpoles.

In a month, when they mature, there's a green heron that comes and sits on the lip of my pool, waiting to spear them up and dine on fresh frogs' legs.

I don't know what those toads and tree frogs feed on, because my pool never shows signs of mosquitoes, not even mosquito larvae. Even in mosquito season, the safest place to be outdoors is down in my mainly empty pool. Tony, my neighbor to the north, whose Latin blood is much fancied by mosquitoes, swears most of them cpme from the stagnant water in my pool. But when he went down into it with boots and bucket and net to prove me wrong, he failed to find a single wriggler. Still, convinced they were lurking there in the murk, he came over one day to dump into it two five-gallon pails of minnow-like fish he'd scooped from a canal -- a fish reputed to eat mosquitoes. Each day I checked to see if they'd grow bigger and fatter. But no, within a month or two they were all dead. From starvation? Or suffocation? Without an oxygen-rich fresh-water stream to feed it, I'm afraid my murky pool itself may be, like many Florida lakes, a "dead" body of water.

One sign, besides the toads and frogs, that mosquitoes might be trying to breed in my pool, is that I often see dragonflies darting about above the surface. They come in all sizes & colors, depending on the season. The damsel flies, like Degas' dancers, are delicate and petite, chartreuse or powder-blue. The dragonflies are big and fat, and come in many colors. Fleets of big fat red ones fly in about once a month, from spring through summer and fall. In midsummer bright green ones appear. In the fall , like hordes of locusts, waves of mean-looking dragonflies with transparent wings banded black and brown invade my yard and pool. Not only are they ugly, but noisy, too, like the police and traffic helicopters that sometimes buzz overhead, checking, maybe, like the dragonflies, to see if I'm breeding mosquitoes in my dark, unchlorinated pool. Will I be cited, fined, arrested, I wonder, and made to fix it up or fill it in? Yet I've never seen a dragonfly eat a skeeter or a wriggler , so I wonder why they come.

My pool itself, with its murky brown water, its mottled layers of peeling blue paint and patches and streaks of mildew, strikes most people's eyes as an ugly thing. But unlike their own ever-sparkling pools that reek of chlorine and groaning pumps, mine, like Nature herself, presents an ever-changing show, and at times a beauty that is spectacular.

Today when I went down into the pool to rake up the last few leaves, I looked up to see a wonderful sight. Shafts of sunlight were streaming down through the live oak branches overhead, spotlighting the first violet bloom to spring up through the floating emerald-green mass of water hyacinths.

That mass, of hundreds of hyacinths that blanket nearly a third of the pool, descended from a pair that I pinched three years ago from a tiny garden pool near Boston, at a nursing home where my sister-in-law Annette spent her last years after a series of near-fatal strokes. I'd put those purloined plants with some water in a Ziploc bag and driven them a thousand miles back with me to Miami. Not only did they surive the hot summer trip; unlike Tony's buckets of fish, they thrived in the murky, nutrient-rich waters of my pool.

And today I wanted to share this splendor. But how? I used to photograph certain dramas in my garden, but no longer. Then I remembered reading how one could place an obect on a scanner plate and capture a digitized image of the thing on a computer. I grabbed my old long-handled pool brush and tried to reach out into the middle of the hyacinth bed to pull that first bloom toward me. But this plant turn out to not to be living apart; not only was its black root ball entangled with the hyrdrilla-like mass of grassy stuff; it was tied as if by a dark red umbiliical cord or feeding tube to its nearby family members. And when I pulled on the pool brush to free it, the brush head fell off and disappeared in the murk, and the delicate bloom toppled over into the muddy water. So I dropped the long pool pole, took off my shoes and socks, and waded gingerly out into the muck-covered, slick-bottomed pool to retrieve the bloom.

When I got it, and myself and the bloom somewhat cleaned up, and stuck it onto my scanner, I was delighted by how lovely even the first scan looked on the computer screen. But the fragile bloom itself never recovered from the struggle in the pool. So tonight, when I found three more hyacinths blooming, I waded back in and picked the best one, and now, doubly-purloined, it can be shared with you.

Here's a paragraph I wrote while composing my "Apollo the Lizard-Slayer" article.
Like a lizard, it was not really at home there, and was quite a distraction from the businss at hand. But I finally grabbed it and tossed it out. Here it is:

"Why I love my lizards"

"As I write, something cold and clammy skitters across my bare knee, races across my desk and disappears into the darkness. Was it a big palmetto bug, one of those huge tropical roaches? I go back to my writing. But when I next look up I see a big green lizard perched on my desk, staring at me. It's large anole, half the size of the lizard you see on Apollo's tree. It's one of countless chameleons that roam my yard and, when the sliding glass doors are open, may enter my house. I do not mind. They eat roaches, and other small insects. They are cute and clean. And I like to see them again as they mov from room to room, changing color to match the color of the walls. From garden green to indoor beige; or, like the big fellow I found the other day in my bathroom, whose walls are covered with jet black tile, from green to black."

Now that I've taken the bull by the horns and removed this pet paragraph about loving lizards that refused to leave the Apollo article, I must mention my all-time-favorite lizard: the fabulous Chinese Dragon, nearly two feet long, with its splendid, hallucinogenic yellow-green skin and orange-yellow crown! Hope I can find a photo of one; otherwise readers will wonder what I'm smoking!


This fellow's a beaut. Best I could find on Google Images. But he's no Golden Dragon. Ain't got no golden crown!

This fellow is lounging on a dieffenbachia, called "dumb cane" because when sucked or eaten (usually by young children) it causes the tongue to swell so much the eater cannot speak.

Or this plant may be a philodendron vine called "Hunter's Robe." In the tropical jungles of South America the nearly naked natives go hunting wearing its enormous leaves as shields and camouflage. You might have bought one in five-and-dime store once to grow on your bath or kitchen window sill, not knowing that in the jungle, and in my garden, its vines can grow out hundreds of feet, and as it seeks the sunlight above the forest canopy, the leaves grow bigger, not smaller, as they grow away from the original root. At the tops of my pepper trees and palms, the leaves are over a foot long. As it climbs a tree, the vine sends out aerial roots, so it's no longer dependent on its original root on the ground. I have one growing on my porch screen, with no visible thread to the ground, and there its cluster of large translucent leaves magically glow when backlit by the late afternoon sun.