Garden finds

The other day I received an email from a woman we met here last year.  This couple has been living in Mazatlan with their teenaged son for the past few years and had bought a piece of land with the idea of building a home.  She's a garden designer and made a living here designing and implementing courtyards for gringos.  Their piece of land had evolved into a demonstration courtyard for her work, complete with outdoor kitchen, covered patio and ornate tile work--and a lovely garden of tropical plants. 

The email advised that they'd sold their land and the new owners plan to build where the garden is--so they were having a big plant give-away.  This morning we headed over with our little shovel and our few remaining painted buckets to see what we could find.  Most of the plants were huge palms and canna lilies and banana and papaya trees--much too big for our purposes--but we did find these cute little border plants and filled the back of the van with them.  We stopped by a little nursery to pick up some soil...

and then came home to plant.  We put them in the front around the little ficus tree and filled all our pails with them.  Even with our concrete patio we're managing to do some gardening.  It's starting to look pretty nice.  Maybe we'll go back tomorrow for one more palmito.

Kathy and her husband are actually moving back to the USA because their son is graduating and wants to take post-secondary schooling there.  Plus they miss their two older daughters.  The plants were for the taking and they collected donations for the Red Cross for Haiti.  So everyone was a winner.