A garden of eatin’

Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2010 MIAMI, FL – In a land as lush with vegetation as this, a wise and talented lady named Mary Calkins Heinlein thought it would be a good idea to plant a garden with examples of every fruit and spice that grows here and in other sub-tropical places of the world. So, after raising funds and overcoming some legal obstacles, she obtained 18 acres of land in 1943. With the design of a landscape architect, Mary began to clear it and get growing. We saw the wonderful results of her efforts today, at the Fruit and Spice Park just a few miles from our campground. Inside the park building, we bought our tickets for a tram tour, and admired the exotic jams, jellies and fruit drinks on sale. At the taste counter, a staff member cut up a whole variety of fruits we’d never seen before and let us sample them. One was bright orange with the consistency of a rather dry banana. Another was soft and white with a gentle sweet taste. A third – and my favourite – was perfectly round, shiny black and the size of a cherry. We were told to split the tough skin with our teeth and squeeze the flesh into our mouths. A white sweet pulp oozed onto my tongue, with a delicate sweetness unlike anything I’d ever tasted! The fruit was called a jaboticaba, and it comes from southern Brazil. While we waited for the tour, we strolled around the grounds, which now take up 35 acres, divided into geographical sections of Mediterranean, African, Australian and Pacific, Asian and tropical American plants. Banana plants were heavy with green bunches growing up from the fleshy purple flower each one puts forth. Coconut palms towered above, while closer to the ground were plants with huge, deeply-lobed leaves the size of a turkey platter. The long, spiraling pleats of spiky palm plants provided hiding places for tiny lizards and spiders, and other trees were hung with round gourds of pebbled green. Huge exotic flowers with slender white petals and bright purple tufts at the centre blossomed next to ripe fruits on the same branch. It was a feast for the eyes! Our senses of smell and taste were tickled as well when Curtis, our guide, plucked some spicy orange and yellow nasturtium flowers to nibble, and crushed the fragrant leaves of the lemon pepper plant. We boarded the tram and he brought us through the garden, making frequent stops to describe various fruits and pick them for us to try. He told us he’d been working in the park for 37 years and actually planted some of the trees himself. He said there were 70 varieties of bananas – and we saw tiny round ones, fat ones that looked like zucchini, and other bunches that look like hands folded in prayer. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 devastated the park, destroying irrigation beds, the nursery, tree canopies and a couple of buildings. We didn’t see any sign of it, but it brought about some redesigning and, of course, replanting. Even though we were there in what is technically “winter”, we could see ripe fruits, blossoms, humming birds, lizards and squirrels everywhere. Have you ever heard of imbe, cotopriz, or marula? How about lucma, rollinia or bilimbi? Not coming to a grocery store near you, probably, but all of them grow here. We also saw pineapple, lychee nut and nutmeg, cacoa, vanilla and sunflowers. It was a feast for the senses.