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The nursery and garden are ideally placed some seven hundred feet above sea level and benefit from a combination of hot sun and moisture-laden breezes with pockets of deep shade. |
A Garden near the Rain Forest
When you visit the Grand Etang rain forest, make a side trip to John Criswick’s nursery and garden a short distance from St. George’s. About a mile after the Texaco petrol station at Tempe on the Grand Etang road take the first right fork and drive through the colourful village of La Mode. After about one and a half miles you come to another fork where there is a sign directing you to St. Rose Nursery. Here you will find a few acres of thousands of tropical plants and trees, neatly potted in the nursery and fernery and growing in their natural habitat in the garden.
The nursery and garden are ideally placed some seven hundred feet above sea level and benefit from a combination of hot sun and moisture-laden breezes with pockets of deep shade. On one side on a burbling stream binds the property, and, on a high densely green ridge above Criswick’s attractive and colourful wooden Caribbean – style house, you can see the 1712 ft Mt. Maitland soaring in the distance.
The tour of the garden itself is a short, cool, easy walk to a pond-filled glade at the bottom. On the way you will see some of the most interesting and intriguing plants in Grenada, together with unusual specimens of popular tropical plants. Even before you alight from your car you can see the ultimate in tropical vines trailing abundantly along the boundary fence.
A Seaside Garden in Lance Aux Epines
Alex and Peggy Cattan have a wealth of experience with hot, dry gardens. They lived in Southern Texas and the Canary Islands before arriving in Grenada several years ago to build their seaside home in the dry southern peninsula of Lance aux Epines a few miles from the town of St. George’s. Less and adventurous gardeners would have probably planted cacti and succulents and left it at that. But the Cattans like challenges and decided they would create the garden they wanted. The topsoil that was there started to slide down the hill into the sea with the little rain that fell. So they built two angled six-foot high concrete semi-circular retaining walls, gently curving for some thirty feet around the hill-side.
