The Resort Town :: Descriptive Essay About A Place

The Resort TownWhen the eye has weary of the human scenery of the resort town, and the body is weary of the towns repetitive entertainments, the visitor may finally notice the fury of alien plants. The misting systems at each 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 longanimous offerings of botanical companionship. To greet these plants, though, I leaded 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 conventionalism enough. I wandered in past the unattended outdoor register and into the universal towers of annual trays -- petunia, impatiens, salvia, and so on -- the same seventeen brief and foreseeable thrills that scream from annual-towers ever soywhere. Behind them, a small display of cactus, unlabeled hardly neat. Behind that, the beginnings of a jun gle 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 hadnt seen a label anywhere. No prices. No identities. No instructions for planting and care. No customers either. I moved alone finished 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 push-down list whose nursery tag still clung to its side. Making my own channel 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 barefaced backward-leaning orange and blue flower that has always made me think of Marilyn Monroe reclining ever so slowly ont o a great divan. Flashy and tender, Strelitzia was the absolute 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 dead so. A screaming red honeysuckle vine was labeled Opuntia -- nipping pear, the familiar cactus that grows in rounded flat pads.