Palm Trees and Gardeners
As I walked under the palm tree, I got dusted by old leaf bases. It was in my eyes and my hair and down my shirt and incredibly itchy. It looked like the brown shaggy dry hair you see on a coconut. I was glad I was on my way home and could go shower. Gardeners were cleaning up the palm trees. Next time I will just turn around and walk another way.
There are a number of Gardeners who work at our complex. They're here from 8 - 6 every day except for Sundays. We've seen at least 4 different ones, and they are always working on something. One of them is very friendly and makes jokes with the children. The other 3 are very quiet. They move the sprinklers around the grounds constantly - no automatic sprinklers here. The sprinklers are tied to bamboo stakes and pushed into the garden. We push the stroller carefully over the hoses when they're lying across the path. The taps don't have handles. The Gardeners use a wrench to turn the taps on and off - which is good, because otherwise the kids playing around here would probably turn them on. When the sprinklers are near the playground, a child will occasionally play with one. I heard the yelling the day one of the boys shot a huge stream of water all over a baby in their stroller! Generally getting a little wet is a nice thing. The kids walk as close as they can to the sprinklers to get a little dusting of water without getting caught in the actual stream of water.
As the Gardeners trim of the long grasses, they tie them into little bundles using leaves as the rope. Sometime they are much larger than the bundles tied below, more like an arm load each.
The guy doing the palm trees wasn't one of our usual Gardeners - which is how I got covered in palm dust. Our Gardeners always stop working and move to the side of the path whenever anyone goes by.
Specialists are used for trimming palm trees, because it is dangerous work. The fronds (branches/leaves) are very heavy. If a bunch of fronds comes down at once, they can trap you under them, suffocating you, especially if you trim by climbing the tree. There's also the risk of falling coconuts. A crane and bucket is the safest way to trim palm trees. This guy was doing it from under the tree with an extended long-handled pruning shears/saw that reminded me of what my grandpa always used to trim the Holly Tree back in Canada.
This property has so many different types of gardens. This garden bed above will be getting a trim soon. You can see the flowers are shooting out of the standard rounded shape now. On these bushes the flowers grow from the ends of the vines only, so they cut the flowers all off to trim it. It makes me sad, even though the flowers are back in a week or two. They only trim down one of the beds at a time, so the flowers on this row might be gone, but if you walk over to the next pier you will see the usual flowers there.