THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 21, 1996 TAG: 9608211011
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: 59 lines
Some of you were disappointed that the recent column on the ever-blooming crape myrtles didn't object to the mess they make when their blossoms fall like so much pink confetti at a birthday party.
The pink trail never struck me as a mess. Anyway, how could a mess object to a mess?
``I wish you had a crape myrtle in your yard,'' one reader stormed.
I do. I just let it be.
A colleague, Sam Martinette, cleans a coverlet of sticky blooms off his car every morning. ``The car looks,'' he said, smiling, ``as if it is a float.''
The chore is, for him, the price of beauty. That's my slant, too.
The magnolia tree also is the object of protests at the leathery brown leaves that collect in such abundance under and 'round it.
As a tree to climb, with so many limbs and branches, it's nature's jungle gym, a ladder to the sky.
It is a giving tree. Women break branches of the glossy green leaves with which to line the mantle or fashion a dinner table centerpiece.
Its beauty endures all seasons. A Colonial botanist wrote of spying across a valley a magnolia's white blooms shining big as dinner plates.
Bedecked with satiny white blossoms from which wafts a lemony scent, it is a Southern belle strewing white handkerchiefs wherever she goes for her suitors to retrieve.
The people of San Diego, I found last week, dote on palm trees that adorn their city. Palms are everywhere - tall, slim, crested with green fronds springing fountain-like, reminiscent of headdresses Algonquin Indians wear in drawings from Colonial Virginia.
In coiffeurs of other palms, fronds extend in all directions, so the slim trees have the raffish look of John Held Jr.'s cartoons of flappers with shag bobs of the 1920s.
Another aspect puzzled me. Here and there were palm trees with their trunks cloaked in masses of scruffy brown leaves from the green crest of fronds to near the base. They seem swathed from neck to shoe tops in thick skirts.
An explanation came from Judy Swink, a graduate of Granby High School in Norfolk, who works in San Diego as research librarian for a two-county cooperative library system. She is a librarian to whom librarians turn for help.
The palms without the rough skirts have been trimmed of dead fronds, she said. The trees look much neater trimmed, but it isn't their natural state.
The skirts of dead fronds help sustain the tree and many insects and birds who live in them.
``I find the trees much more attractive with their skirts on,'' she said, ``but people seem to want to sanitize nature.''
Crape myrtles, magnolias, palm trees - enhancing seaport cities a continent apart. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
Crape Myrtles
Their pink confetti makes a pretty mess
Magnolias
Jungle gyms by CNB