A cracking time with rubber seeds

Rubber nuts are nicely camouflaged, making them difficult to spot on the forest floor.

Each year at around this time I am infallibly startled by the sound of someone stepping on  fallen branch in the rubber plantation next door. I look around for the intruder. No one in sight. There’s another “crack”, and a third. Still no one. Spooky.

And then I realise.

Bamboo – the ultimate torture machine

The shoot on the left is too old. Take the one on the right, about 18 inches high..

It’s the rainy season. Today, we’ve had thunder, lightning, deluge, big gusts of wind. Right now, it’s just pouring steadily, at a rate that tells you you should start building an ark, because it’s never going to stop.

All that rain also means it’s bamboo season, and we’re hacking off shoots as fast as we can. We can’t eat it all, so friends and neighbours are also benefitting.

Bamboos belong to the grass family, and are (just in case no one had ever told you this) the fastest-growing plants in the world. Given the right conditions, they can grow half a metre in a day.

Horizontal rain means horizontal trees

Oops. The neighbours' rubber-tapping shed was no match for the Sator, which was about 3 feet in diameter and about 80 feet tall.

It’s that time of year in Phuket when things get a bit wet and wild. What – despite efforts to rebrand it as “summer” – people here call the “low” season. The Southwest Monsoon season has set in, with spectacular storms coming in from the Indian Ocean, each dumping a Niagara of rain on the island in a couple of minutes.

Trees that go kabloom

Rosewood flowers are tiny. It takes many millions to cover the tree.

We have about 20 Asian Rosewood trees in the garden, one of them right next to the house. It gives shade, and we have a table and four chairs under it – which actually get used rarely because it means bringing the cushions out for them, and then taking them back inside afterward so they don’t get filthy.