The Resort Town :: Descriptive Essay About A Place

The Resort Town When the eye has tired of the human scenery of the resort town, and the body is weary of the town's repetitive entertainments, the visitor may finally notice the fury of alien plants. The misting systems at every resort, designed for cooling rows of prostrate bodies, also provide the right conditions for equatorial jungles. The resort had made the most of this opportunity. I started to feel the more patient offerings of botanical companionship. To greet these plants, though, I needed to know their names. For that, I would need a nursery, and only one was close enough to walk to. From the front, it looked normal enough. I wandered in past the unattended outdoor register and into the usual towers of annual trays -- petunia, impatiens, salvia, and so on -- the same seventeen brief and predictable thrills that scream from annual-towers everywhere. Behind them, a small display of cactus, unlabeled but neat. Behind that, the beginnings of a jungle of larger containers. Along the side of the property, a large unkempt man drove in a golf cart with a tree in the seat beside him. The proprietor. At once, I saw some of the plants that I had come to identify. I looked for their labels. There were none. Glancing around, I realized that I hadn't seen a label anywhere. No prices. No identities. No instructions for planting and care. No customers either. I moved alone through a containerized wilderness, all sights obscured by overgrown but anonymous vines, trees, shrubs. Finally, there, a label! A low, greyish shrub cowered in a hexagonal pot whose nursery tag still clung to its side. Making my own path through the sea of containers, I bent down to read. "Strelitzia," it said. My mind flashed a picture of Strelitzia, the "bird of paradise," a soaring tropical plant with foot-long leaves and an audacious backward-leaning orange and blue flower that has always made me think of Marilyn Monroe reclining ever so slowly onto a great divan. Flashy and tender, Strelitzia was the perfect opposite of the tough and humble desert shrub that actually grew in this container. Well, I thought, at least they transplant things here. Perhaps one pot in a hundred bore any label at all, and each label was not just wrong but perfectly so. A screaming red honeysuckle vine was labeled Opuntia -- prickly pear, the familiar cactus that grows in rounded flat pads.