"Ooh, look! A pretty flower!"
- Jeannie Roberts
- Jul 8
- 5 min read
Melanie is never lost.
She’s in the garden.
In every place she’s ever lived - and she’s had a few addresses - she has transformed patchy grass, dirt and piles of rocks into magnificent gardens. She’s created award-winning yards that have consistently brought strangers to her door to ask questions, or just to admire.
If anyone doubts that this has not already happened in Costa Rica, you don’t know Melanie.
When we first looked at this home, last in a line of five or six houses during a day with our realtors Brooke & Karina, I loved this one most but had reservations. “I’m afraid (Melanie) will get out here in the yard and never come in,” I told Brooke. “She’ll work herself so hard.”
Shame on me. Mea culpa.
I wanted to relax into retirement, do some writing, a lot of reading, mostly hanging out on a porch staring at the mountains. Foot surgery aside, this is pretty much how I have approached my first 18 months of retirement. What I have had to remember is that, even as hard as she works, gardening is Melanie’s safe, relaxing space, a spiritual experience every single day. So, with a new and complicated palette in a brand new country, she was literally in her heaven.
So I shut my mouth and left well enough alone.
And oh my, has it been fun to watch this artist at work! There’s just no way to do her justice.
The yard was considerably overgrown when we moved in. Plenty of various fruit trees and bushes and plants of all varieties, but they were so crowded and were beginning to strangle each other out - and totally blocked our view. Even I could tell that the yard needed to breathe, and my knowledge of gardening rises to the ceiling of “Ooh, look! A pretty flower!”
Melanie set Mario, our gardener, onto a gargantuan task. (In Costa Rica, gardeners don’t really tend flowers so much as mow - here, that means weed eat - the lawn, prune limbs and blow the property nice and clean twice a month.) The first time she met him, they wandered the property together, Melanie pointing out wide swaths of the yard. “Este. Todo.” “This. All,” followed by a chopping motion. Mario and his machete promptly set to work.
Several days of heavy work yielded a whole yard of debris, piles of limbs that had succumbed to Mario’s machete and chain saw. Far too much for Mario to haul away, we paid to have a large heavy truck to make 2 trips to haul all this away. The morning of haul, Melanie was out starting at 4:30 a,m, helping Mario, his son and wife bring all the piles of debris in the back and side yard round to the front. Unfortunately, I had to lie on the couch with my foot atop a pillow. So no help from me. After much todo and some serious roadblocks, finally … by 7 o’clock the debris, trucks and extras were gone.
A clean palette.
Melanie found a local nursery, educated herself about new flora and fauna, learned about the dry season and the rainy season, studied sun patterns. She learned a few key words in Spanish: “sol” (sun), “sombra” (shade), “plantas” (plants), “vivero” (nursery.) She didn’t get in the car for any reason (gas, black beans, bank) without coming back with a carload of plantas. Sometimes she still stops on the side of the road to grab a cutting from flowers that grow wild here.
She has placed climbing flowering vines to cover the fence around our property, and she goes out faithfully every day to twine them up and up a little further.
Once, she saw a plant she coveted growing on a home’s fence. When she ran into someone leaving that property, she asked if he was the homeowner. “No,” he said, but hollered over his shoulder, “George! Vivian!”
Typical of Costa Rican Ticos, Vivian and George invited Melanie onto their patio. She told them she’d been looking for that particular plant, what is it called and do they know where she can buy it? Vivian said simply, “would you like one of ours?” and handed Melanie a pot with an entire plant in it. Now it grows in our yard.
It might have been Melanie’s happiest moment as a gardener here. She was so excited to share the story with me and show me the purple plant. I was appropriately impressed with the Tico kindness and oohed and aahed at the new acquisition.
It was a pretty magical Costa Rica moment, but also pretty typical of Tico kindness. Melanie has also befriended Ana, who runs the neighborhood nursery closest to us. She’s also found bigger, more extensive nurseries further away. She has gardening buddies who sometimes take the trip with her.
And oooh, the girl is happy! She starts every morning with a walk around the yard, sometimes stopping to sit at an area that warrants special attention. When I see her sitting on the lawn in such rapt reverence, I imagine that she is telling each blade of grass what a rare and special blade of grass it is.
I’m happy too, but not because I actually get my hands in the dirt on the regular. I am content to sit and watch things grow and bloom, and to watch the larger scenescape appear. There is always something beautiful to look at - flowers, hummingbirds, mountains. It’s almost as if the plants and flowers, having cherished Melanie’s company so much, just want to perform for her.
She never stops having creative ideas for what to do next, and it’s fun to watch her mind whir with ideas and ways to make them happen. Currently, she’s onto an idea of making our yard a plethora of smaller gardens of different types with a walking path through them all. Flowers, herbs, bushes, trees even, so that you could wander through
and actually seem lost, though you are loving exactly where you are.
In this scenario, you may not know what you’ll come on next until you actually see it. And then you could choose your own favorite garden space.
Melanie has even planted a bird of paradise plant for me because it was my mom’s favorite flower, and it grows spectacularly here. And azeleas that remind me of Tallahassee!
I am infinitely blessed by, well, everything. I guess in the great scheme of the Universe, a wonderful garden could be considered insignificant. But, here, it's a beautiful tile in the mosaic of the Universe.
Thank you, Melanie, for the beauty you add to the world in so many ways.
Love the story. Your yard is like Paradise Evolved. It looks so beautiful! But that picture that shows the sky and a mountain in the distance, WOW! And the Blue Morpho was my Mom's favorite butterfly.