My garden in heat and rain

THE rains have come, and none too soon. My garden was lying prostrate in the heat for weeks, parts of it almost dying in the last three weeks of May. Grass had turned brown or sparse, a welter of falling leaves in heat-affected colors of yellow and brown were the pathetic scenes. A newly planted kamagong tree of 6 feet showed so much stress that we had to dig it up and put it in hospital (a shady nook of the garden). Palm tree leaves were so stressed they had turned brown.

It was just in the past three weeks that the stress became apparent. Before that the Palawan cherry tree (informal name), which is not looked on with kind eyes by endemic purists for being foreign or imported into this country, burst into cascades of pink and white blossoms from hanging branches. This tree is much present in Mindanao and Palawan and must have come through the Indonesian archipelago or Borneo. In the towns of Mindanao, it occupies a prominent place in the plazas and is a very impressive and exhilarating sight in full bloom. Across the street in my son's garden, the tree from Singapore, which we planted some 40 years ago and has grown about 30 meters tall, turned yellow with blooms that lasted less than a week. But while in bloom, it was an impressive sight like a yellow crown being borne aloft. The trunk itself is so wide that it looks older than 40 years. Not to be outdone, the two macopa trees had pink fruit that kept shooting down before we could pick them. The mangoes were also very impatient, suddenly unhinging themselves and like projectiles, coming down to earth at such speed that when they hit a roof along the way it felt like a bomb had exploded. The same with the Indian mango, another 30-foot specimen, which means its abundant fruit at the very top is impossible to get to. We bought a pole online, but the 1.5-meter length was not enough. Consequently, Indian mango bombs also come down not only into my garden but the neighbor's laundry area roof, surely an annoyance of Nature via their neighbor.