Rose Diaz, who owns Camia Garden on Msgr. Guerrero Road in Chalan Kiya, said it all started with ginger.
Unlike any other plant nurseries on island, Rose’s garden has the kind of ambiance that makes you feel you’re in a strange place, somewhere very far from here.
The garden is shaded due to its gigantic royal palms, silver palms, traveler’s palms and other varieties of ornamental trees. The curtains of roots from millionaire’s vines and the mist that blurs your way and makes the ground muddy have turned the place into an enchanted kingdom.
Along the narrow pathway are rows of thousands of flowering plants — most of them are different types of ginger.
Having been in so many places since her childhood, Rose is somehow bored with common plants. So when she surrounded her residence with plants in the early 1990s, she started with ginger, one variety of which is Camia after which her garden is named.
Although a couple of her gingers are edible — the turmeric and the kitchen ginger — Rose is more fascinated with the ornamental kinds that she got from different places like Hawaii, the mainland U.S. and Asian countries.
Among her favorites are the beehive ginger, which is used in manufacturing shampoo, and the attractive torch ginger.
Rose has a long list of the varieties of ginger in her garden.
Those that serve as an exotic hedge, totally blocking her house from the sight of passersby, are the spiral ginger, the Tahitian ginger, the shell ginger and the pink ginger.
She also has different varieties of hellecconias or ornamental bananas. These include the birds of paradise, rainbow helleconia, cats’ claw, yellow helleconia among many others.
The garden also has a giant papyrus which Rose brought from the Nile River in Egypt.
She was told that sacred scrolls were made from this water-dependent plant which, in her garden, is surrounded with countless types of flowering plants like jasmin, kadena de amor, yesterday-today-and-tomorrow and ilang-ilang which serve as the garden’s natural “air-fresheners.”
Below the towering royal palms are fan palms which, during a windy day, can emit sounds that seem to give the garden a life of its own.
“It is a perfect art that brings tranquility to my life,” said Rose, referring to her garden which she likes to view from her veranda. “It looks great at night,” she added.
Besides tranquility and a few dollars she earns from selling flowers, there is another priceless reward her garden gives her: the various species of birds that now inhabit the area.
Rose believe that besides giving them shelter, her garden also provides these birds with food.
“All I can do is share with them whatever they can get from the garden,” Rose said. In return, she said, the birds re-pay her with their twittering and chirruping that add to the beauty of her garden.
