palm trees and banana leaves

I’ve been doing pastels and paintings of the sun soaked, colorful houses of St. George, Bermuda.  A four hundred year old harbor town, tropical twin of Jamestown.  The town’s houses are roofed white with limestone whitewash, an ingenious method of waterproofing, cooling the house and disinfecting the rainwater as it runs down and into cisterns.  I found this little intersection houses in an alley with a palm tree growing up among them.   It’s squat, rich, rough, burlap draped trunk rises up under the sweeps of palm fronds. 

 

I love the awkward, messy quality of banana leaves.  When we lived in Key West years ago, we had a small tree in our backyard.  It was the favorite haunt of green lizards.  I would trim the old, ragged leaves off and give them to the children to play with, not knowing that the clear sap when it gets on your clothes turns brown after being washed.  It was several months before we solved that mystery.