RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE PRACTICE OF GUERRILLA GARDENING IN THE CARIBBEAN

VARIOUS readers expressed opinions

regarding this practice. I started

(without knowing it during the 80's) and 

have continued for the last 30 months.

THE first consideration is soil type, if you want to be effective.  My guerrilla scenarios have two..  Mostly sand, as our house and former San Carlos Hospital or clay with construction refuse hard as hell  with tons of rocks. Keep that in mind.

For clay types, you need tools. If planting  Pandanus, Tamarindus indica or anything with a significant root ball.  If planting by seeds is better to act after the weed whackers have attacked, leaving the ground bare.  Both conditions of soil will improve your attack after it has rained or before.  Consider that plants/trees I suggest will survive without irrigation.

Any kind of vegetation in my urban context needs to tolerate heat, salt breeze, drought, lack of nutrients and pests. That is why I keep an inventory from my collection showing excellent survival rates.

SORRY. If you depend on nurseries to buy plants as in England, USA and such forget it, it will not work over here. Collect from your own flora as I do, watch, observe juat happens to provide pertinent advise.

INVENTORY

not mentioned

Merremia quinquefolia

Ipomoea quamoclit/aegyptia

Passiflora foetida

Antigonum leptopus

Clitora ternatea

Centrosema pubescens

Mirabilis siciliana

Cosmos sulphureous

Turnera ulmiforme/diffusa 

Final words.

Almost everything mentioned is self seeding, however it is hard to collect seeds from Turneras.  I suggest to plant them no taller than eight inches.  If just one survives,  five to ten will grow in ninety days or less depending on conditions. These small bushes are so resistant, they survive in minuscule cracks in concrete, spread by wind.

In terms of aesthetics, some considerations are worth mentioning. Hospital San Carlos is just concrete walls and asphalt.  There is only an  18 inches wide, 75 long strip of mostly sand, between one and the other as you may observe on the walls.

The messy look, adds to the beauty, hiding the asphalt and reducing heat refraction, making life difficult in addition, for those graffiti 'artists' into tagging. Local insects, reptiles and birds benefit either from the pollen, nectar or flowers for feeding.

Apaga i vamonoh...

ANTIGONUM TRAVELS SOUTH

I DO not like to drive.  Or being in a car.
The streets, roads, highways are like rush hour constantly, except on Sundays at certain time.

IN my younger days I used to visit between five to ten municipalities in one shot. Yesterday, it was downtown Yauco and Ponce.

Antonio Santaella and his Tablao Flamenco was the reason to take what would become a seven hour round trip. There is no doubt, how much Spain left in our blood over five centuries ago, while watching these students performing. Mr. Santaella is a master singer and dancer with over four decades of teaching in the metro zone.

The pictures show a little nature in the urban, suburbia context. Architecture dominates the scene, with a ugly sculpture monstrosity, that the reader/observer will be able to judge.

One thing is cliche crystal clear. The architects, carpenters, designers from the past, (let me place it arbitrarily: 70 years ago and back), knew about vicinity
style, construction materials and atmosphere, context, scale, proportion, use of space and detail. 

That is the only explanation I have to comprehend my sensations when I get a chance to observe these structures, private residences and else.

In many ancient southern down towns there is no conflict between nature and what men built. In essence there is no vegetation. The way it should be. But let the record show this phenomenon of museum like houses seem to occur only in the dry, hot, south of Puerto Rico. 

I do not mean that it could not be found  in the north, east or west, but apparently wealthy, sophisticated people, with great taste and resources migrated and or lived in those regions in great numbers during the tobacco, coffee and sugar cane eras. You will not find one Ficus for example, in a back yard  in front or any other common place tree dwarfing or lifting the structure with its roots.

Let me finish writing that architects those avaricious idiots sacrificed all that seems important, for their personal profits. That is why they design digitally,  with cardboard, the brutal regtangular concrete match boxes, vertical or horizontal hardscape hell context Puerto Rico has become.

IN OLD SAN JUAN ll

THIS is the end of a three part posts in same amount of blogs. Old San Juan has kept some of the old charm considering that as with nature, many men have made possible its destruction, in the name of profits.

The city is strangled by automobiles on a daily basis.  There are trees, the wrong species, in most places. Most are mutilated, dying, sick or dead, but still standing.

However the wise men and women avoid dropping by during week ends when the pollution, noise, thanks to la vuelta del pendejo, makes the situation
unbearable.

Bizarre sign: San Juan Florece.  It leaves no doubts of my stance regarding the natives and expats, blind to this overwhelming ugly reality. 

apaga i vamonoh.

UNIVERSIDAD SAGRADO CORAZON DOES IT BETTER? THE SAGA

IT is difficult, really, to look and see, to listen, tolerate, the dominant scenery.  I could look the other way or walk around with blindfolds, but it wont work.

          But the show must go on.

l

I will start from bad to worse. Check the small water leak, this is not the fecal kind. Millions of gallons of fresh water running down sidewalks, streets, gutters for the last five years all over PR does it better. Custom and use for the whole island. One small token for the record.

ll

Sagrado Corazon

street sidewalk repairs.

Believe me not many people walk down or up these.  There is a national problem to determine priorities, like volume of pedestrians.  Another, why repair streets  during working days, disrupting the traffic for people going and coming from work? JERKS. 

SOME may have notice the featuring footer. It is  particularly ugly, ordinary, with dubious aesthetics fountain? 
I wonder if the artist was on crack. It reminds me of illegal water/electricity
takes in so many countries of the world.
A piece of concrete/metal manure.


It is where else? Universidad Sagrado Corazon, pioneers with a black little person on some 360 degrees tv show.
I have other monstrosities in their lobby area, where the illegal cafeteria pollutes with the food stench and daily noises.

Well this is it. The cold bloody murder of aesthetics in Universidad Sagrado Corazon requires no words. Take a look from Not a snow plow going up...Check the ill mowed turf, shitty if you ask me...The incorrect pruned Ixoras and the overwhelming ferns. In this space,  open surrounded by walls, and halls, one should be surrounded by beauty. Metallic or green, dead or living. Instead, one finds the most ridiculous assorted metal scrap or "art" in the San Juan metropolitan area and probably in the whole island. 
That is for the eyes, for your listening entertainment, the water falling from those twisted ugly 'artsie' pipes sound
like what they give the impression to be:
broken leaking water pipes.

One of the most expensive universities of Puerto Rico...Imagine the quality of artists coming out of this environment, not to get into the astronomical tuition fees paid and what they get.  


That is that...


If you love this, got hooked? I got more pictures.
COMING SOON IN 
endemismotrasnochado photo archives
Sagrado Corazon the "art" saga.

Under the same tittle...

DISCLAIMER
as an horticultural creative critic I declare
the liberty to express my views regarding this worthless art, except sold
as scrap metal. The editor declares that no personal
interest is behind it. Except showing the world this concrete
asphalt  cave of thieves has no hope or is hopeless..