Fallen Fruit and Views

The south part of the house is one large room with extensive glass on 3 sides.  It faces a valley to the west.  One can sit by the large windows and see an amazing display of natural visitors.  You will look out and large, talkative birds, known as Talamanca Chachalacas are walking right past you, deep in conversation.  Another time, there will be a blinding flash of sudden color and noise filling the space beyond the windows.  This is a flock of wild parrots who tend to do a swoop loop right past the breakfast table before stopping for brunch in the zapote fruit tree just below.  There could be a miniature dinosaur which we call iquanas and of course monkeys just passing through making a banana run.

In some ways though, the most exciting vision nature provides at the house is the Morpho Butterfly.  During parts of the year we see them daily.  In the stunning blue version it was made nearly extinct by people who caught and killed them to sell to people who thought it was desirable to own a dead miracle.  One day, while walking off trail near the house we found a solitary, forgotten starfruit tree.  Starfruit is a tart plump fruit that is full of high-value nutrients.  It’s rarely available commercially because it rots quickly.  And that is a wonderful thing, because fallen fruit is the generous gift that nature offers to its children.  Morpho butterflies feed on rotting fallen fruit, so that lonely starfruit tree is a significant beginning for restoring an endangered species.

Two points here to cover briefly:

FALLEN FRUIT    As rewilding happens across the estate, fruit trees somehow find ideal spots that meet their particular needs in places that may seem random to us but make perfect sense to them.  You might say that such decentralized abundance because it can only be harvested by nature itself, is going to waste.   But wilderness is bewildering in its complex coherence.

VIEWS    We can look far and near.  The house location was created with an eye toward the long view, far to the south and north and close enough to ocean that one can see storms above the beaches.  Over time, the short view made its importance known, which is to say the trees grew.  For the first few years at the estate, we would look out and say “that big tree is blocking the view”.  Gradually we came to appreciate that it was the view.  That big tree, called zapote bears a small and quite delicious fruit which we were never able to harvest because all manner of flying and crawling things got to it first.  But that’s OK, because we got our nutrition in mind and spirit watching the overlapping communities that gathered at the zapote.