Reviews for The Green Iguana Manual

The average rating for The Green Iguana Manual based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-05-13 00:00:00 Rick Mayer An ode to the coconut tree Palms are the evergreens of the tropics, but arguably more beautiful. It is often the case that the most unusual and the most rare of anything is considerd the most beautiful but not so with palms. Btw in the Caribbean palms are always called by their names, like coconut tree, never 'palm'. The commonest palm of all, springing up in everyone's garden, sometimes whole groves of them (I had 40 in my garden before Irma. Then I had none, or none with tops on anyway), on every beach you see them on the margins of sand and land. Sometimes on the beaches they grow very tall and a coconut man with a spike strapped to his foot will climb up and put a rope with a tyre on the end so you can swing high out over the sea. V.S. Naipaul said if you lie under one and look up you will see a perfect in the middle, and you do! They are dotted throughout the woods and rainforest, planted in botanical gardens, eding formal driveways although more usually it is the royal palms people associate with Florida, but actually they are native to the Caribbean. But no matter where you go in the tropics, there are a lot of coconut trees. They are not only the most beautiful but also the most useful. In every market place there is a coconut seller selling green jelly coconuts. They slice off a palm-sized piece, machete the top third off the coconut and there is the translucent jelly and your little wedge will scoop it out. Get the coconuts even younger than that and just the top will be chopped off and rum will be poured in, add a straw and you have rum-and-coconut-water. Let the coconut mature and there is the usual solid white coconut that we make culinary grated coconut from. Let it ripen further and it is is pressed for oils for cooking, soap and lipsticks among other things. Coconut water is 100% sterile and identical to human blood plasma - it's quite to inject it, and has been used as a substitute for saline. As it's sterile, it's a good drink for people with GI issues. The husk of the coconut and the 'bark' which is beautiful and lacy and looks exactly like someone has woven it, warp and weft, make coconut matting. The long leaves thatch beach houses, or make walls that dry to golden brown and protect from the sun and rain. The long wooden husks that peel away from the coconut flowers are toys for kids or with the ends chopped off, lovely canoe-like fruit bowls. What do you do with the husks and old dried leaves that fall off? Burn them. They make good kindling. There is another coonut, quite rare in the Caribbean, but grown in the Pacific, called the Coco de Mer. It's a double coconut, kind of like conjoined twins and takes ten years to ripen. It looks exactly like a nice round bottom, cleft and all. About the size of one too. Some of them look more (as one of my teachers, Robina Ponsonby-Smythe - real name - called it) like a lady's 'front bottom'. My favourite coconut trees are the dwarf ones, only about 8 or 9' high, the coconuts are a bright, slightly pale orange and easy to pick. That's why they are my favourites. In the Pacific but not the Caribbean there are huge crabs, really really huge ones that go up coconut trees and with their immense claws can actually crack one open. Kind of stuff of nightmares really. So that was pretty exhaustive, right? I wonder if anyone read it or their eyes drifted off? I must say I had a hard time editing it. I really do love coconut trees and appear to know more about them than I realised.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-10 00:00:00 Jerrilyn Richardson OK. I "might" have a bit of an addiction to palms in my garden. I literally studied this book from cover to cover. It's probably the definitive guide to the genus in this country.