Bougainvillea Quotes

Marco opened the walkway gate just as a sprightly grey lizard skittered across the stone path. A bougainvillea vine laden with a riot of purple blooms scaled the right side of the house, and the heady scent of gardenias saturated the air.

The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is. There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside. Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts

The bougainvillea hung about it, purple and magenta, in livid balloons.

Bougainvillea bloomed on their porch like a discarded prom dress.

Last apricot light flooded landward and brought their shadows uphill, past the lifeguard towers, into terraces of bougainvillea, rhododendrons, and ice plant.

And the purple parted before it, snapping back like skin after a slash, and what it let out wasn't blood but light: amazing orange light that filled her heart and mind with a terrible mixture of joy, terror, and sorrow. No wonder she had repressed this memory all these years. It was too much. Far too much. The light seemed to give the fading air of evening a silken texture, and the cry of a bird struck her ear like a pebble made of glass. A cap of breeze filled her nostrils with a hundred exotic perfumes: frangipani, bougainvillea, dusty roses, and oh dear God, night-blooming cereus... And rising above one horizon came the orange mansion of the moon, bloated and burning cold, while the sun sank below the other, boiling in a crimson house of fire. She thought that mixture of furious light would kill her with its beauty.

Um…you’re four blocks away. Why can’t you walk?” “I’m naked.” Sometimes the truth was like a band-aid in need of removal; one had to get it over with as quickly as possible. “And I’m sitting in a bougainvillea bush.” Jason was silent. Even his silence sounded angry. Praline knew he should have sent a text.

You've punctured my solitude, I told you. It had been a useful solitude, constructed, as it was, around a recent sobriety, long walks to and from the Y through the sordid, bougainvillea-strewn back streets of Hollywood, evening drives up and down Mulholland to kill the long nights, and, of course, maniacal bouts of writing, learning to address no one. But the time for its puncturing had come. I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one's solitude right, this is the prize.

She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn’t a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile.

The memories come back like the rainbow after the rain with all the hues and shades of color and an unending train the bougainvillea tree nearby my parents house where I grew up did not ask me my name she embraced me as she had done in my schooldays in every way the same the little squirrel just now tip-toed down the lane looking at the spectacle unfolding in the rain after all these years I have come back to my parents home the clouds have different shapes but the air smells the same ...

When I crossed the street, according to my mother, I still had to hold someone’s hand. At ten, I would be able to cross streets unhanded. I’d held on to Joseph’s many times before, for many years, but holding his was like holding a plant, and the disappointment of fingers that didn’t grasp back was so acute that at some point I’d opted to take his forearm instead. For the first few street crossings, that’s what I did, but on the corner at Oakwood, on an impulse, I grabbed George’s hand. Right away: fingers, holding back. The sun. More clustery vines of bougainvillea draping over windows in bulges of dark pink. His warm palm. An orange tabby lounging on the sidewalk. People in torn black T-shirts sitting and smoking on steps. The city, opening up. We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.

Those are my bougainvillea—I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive. But Right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing.

A huge, purple bell, with three tender flowerets in its heart, ensconced in a crown of twigs. A sunbeam fell on the purple flower and made it glow red. The whole thing looked like a tiny world in itself, a fantastic world of flower and fire, light and silence." -- Bougainvillea

Louis found me in the rear parlor, the one more distant from the noises of the tourists in the Rue Royale, and with its windows open to the courtyard below. I was in fact looking out the window, looking for the cat again, though I didn't tell myself so, and observing how our bougainvillea had all but covered the high walls that enclosed us and kept us safe from the rest of the world. The wisteria was also fierce in its growth, even reaching out from the brick walls to the railing of the rear balcony and finding its way up to the roof. I could never quite take for granted the lush flowers of New Orleans. Indeed, they filled me with happiness whenever I stopped to really look at them and surrender to their fragrance, as though I still had the right to do so, as though I still were part of nature, as though I were still a mortal man.

I’ve started dreaming in Spanish, which has never happened before. I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is changing, something chemical and irreversible. There’s a magic here working its way through my veins. There’s something about the vegetation, too, that I respond to instinctively - the stunning bougainvillea, the flamboyants and jacarandas, the orchids growing from the trunks of the mysterious ceiba trees. And I love Havana, its noise and decay and painted ladyness. I could happily sit on one of those wrought-iron balconies for days, or keep my grandmother company on her porch, with its ringside view of the sea. I’m afraid to lose all this, to lose Abuela Celia again. But sooner or later I’d have to return to New York. I know now it’s where I belong - not instead of here, but more than here. How can I tell my grandmother this?

If there's anything that still connects me to God, it's color. I've yet to find a man-made color that wasn't first displayed in creation. From the deep fuchsia of a bougainvillea to the shocking chartreuse of the moss that clings to the rocks and trees in the damp coastal mountain range, all are unique to God's imagination. I've seen starfish donning brilliant neon orange and regal purple and wildflowers in every hue of the color wheel. We cannot out create Him.

She was beautiful and lithe, with soft skin the color of bread and eyes like green almonds, and she had straight black hair that reached to her shoulders, and an aura of antiquity that could just as well have been Indonesian as Andean. She was dressed with subtle taste: a lynx jacket, a raw silk blouse with very delicate flowers, natural linen trousers, and shoes with a narrow stripe the color of bougainvillea. ‘This is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,’ I thought, when I saw her pass by with the stealthy stride of a lioness, while I waited in the check-in line at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for the plane to New York.

The bougainvillea bushes surrounding the school had been replaced with a high brick wall to keep out the stray bullets, which sometimes lodged themselves in the classrooms.

Her hair falls loose in a cascade of black curls, caught in a crown of magenta bougainvillea.

They spent the day with Lucia, who promised that the following day she would take them up to Scala, an even tinier, loftier town where her parents now lived. That evening, Mac took her to a restaurant called Il Flauto di Pan- Pan's Flute- perched at the Villa Cimbrone among the gardens and crumbling walls. It was probably the most beautiful restaurant she'd ever seen. The centuries-old villa was embellished with incredible gardens of fuchsia bougainvillea, lemon and cypress trees and flowering herbs that scented the air. Their veranda table had an impossibly gorgeous view of the sea.

The light irradiates white peaks of Annapurna marching down the sky, in the great rampart that spreads east and west for eighteen hundred miles, the Himalaya- the alaya (abode, or home) of hima (snow).Hibiscus, frangipani, bougainvillea: seen under snow peaks, these tropical blossoms become the flowers of heroic landscapes. Macaques scamper in green meadow, and a turquoise roller spins in a golden light. Drongos, rollers, barbets, and white Eqyptian vulture are the common birds, and all have close relatives in East Africa.

You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you. It had been a useful solitude, constructed, as it was, around a recent sobriety, long walks to and from the Y through the sordid, bougainvillea-strewn back streets of Hollywood, evening drives up and down Mulholland to kill the long nights, and, of course, maniacal bouts of writing, learning to address no one. But the time for its puncturing had come. I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one’s solitude right, this is the prize.

            Time stretched to dry on the rooftops I am in Mixcoac                           Letters rot in the mailboxes                         The bougainvillea against the wall’s white lime                                            flattened by the sun a stain a purple                         passionate calligraphy written by the sun I am walking back                             back to what I left or to what left me                              Memory edge of the abyss                             balcony over the void                     I walk and do not move forward from "Return

In awe at the sheer beauty of the setting, Celina stepped onto the balcony, which overlooked a terrace garden of fruit trees. "It's so beautiful here." She breathed in, catching the scent of fruit trees below. "What type of fruit are you growing?" "Mostly lemon," Sara said. "But also olive, grapefruit, orange, fig, and pomegranate. With our temperate climate, most everything thrives." Celina peered over the balcony's edge. To one side, a cliff dropped to the sea, while on the other, a terrace sprawled along the hilltop perch. Flaming pink bougainvillea and snowy white jasmine curled around the corners of grapevine-covered archways that framed the shimmering ocean view.

These rocky, verdant, and volcanic landscapes of the Greek Isles exert their own charm, but it is the sea that dominates every aspect of life. Winding paths hug the shoreline, revealing hidden coves and inlets of turquoise water sparkling in the sun. So many constructions--whether house, church, shop, or restaurant--offer a vista of the blue sea. Terraces spilling over with bougainvillea, and balconies bearing hand-hewn wooden chairs take advantage of the views afforded by crescent-shaped harbors and quiet bays. Each island takes pride in its own picturesque fishing harbors. Off the ports of Kalymnos, fishermen and skin divers gather sponges, octopi, grouper, and shellfish.

A Rakshasi did not live here. A princess did. I was staring into the most dazzling garden I had ever seen. Cobblestone pathways meandered between rows of salmon-hued hibiscus, regal hollyhock, delicate impatiens, wild orchids, thorny rosebushes, and manicured shrubs starred with jasmine. Bunches of bougainvillea cascaded down the sides of the wall, draped across the stone like extravagant shawls. Magnolia trees, cotton-candy pink, were interspersed with coconut trees, which let in streaks of purplish light through their fanlike leaves. A rock-rimmed pond glistened in a corner of the garden, and lotus blossoms sprouting from green discs skimmed its surface. A snow white bird that looked like a peacock wove in and out through a grove of pomegranate trees, which were set aflame by clusters of deep orange blossoms. I had seen blue peacocks before, but never a white one. An Ashoka tree stood at one edge of the garden, as if on guard, near the door. A brief wind sent a cluster of red petals drifting down from its branches and settling on the ground at my feet. A flock of pale blue butterflies emerged from a bed of golden trumpet flowers and sailed up into the sky. In the center of this scene was a peach stucco cottage with green shutters and a thatched roof, quaint and idyllic as a dollhouse. A heavenly perfume drifted over the wall, intoxicating me- I wanted nothing more than to enter.

Let’s say it was May in the first decade of the hardly promising twenty-first century, and a white stucco wall, corsaged in bougainvillea and lit up by the moon, enticed them downhill a long way past gated properties to a wider road, then down that road and across it on the other side to the lookout onto the sparkle that was the city and what lay before them at the liftoff of another beginning, which feeling they would experience again, until decades shrank to pieces of colored stone, mosaics unexpected and unfitted yet shellacked together and made to glow alike in recollection so that all she had known of love and the end of love could be summoned and summed up in a ceiling pinked in sulfurous light.

I took a cautious step inside, marveling at the sight before me. A vast conservatory awaited, or what 'once' was a conservatory. Sunlight beamed through the enormous glass roof. I realized that its position at the center of the house precluded its visibility from below. In awe, my heart beating wildly, I lingered in an arbor covered with bright pink bougainvillea, with a trunk so thick, it was larger than my waist. Most of it had died off, but a single healthy vine remained, and it burst with magenta blossoms. I could smell citrus warming in the sunlight, and I immediately noticed the source: an old potted lemon tree in the far corner. 'This must have been Lady Anna's.' I walked along the leaf-strewn pathway to a table that had clearly once showcased dozens of orchids. Now it was an orchid graveyard. Only their brown, shriveled stems remained, but I could imagine how they'd looked in their prime. I smiled when I picked up a tag from one of the pots. 'Lady Fiona Bixby. She must have given them her own names.' Perhaps there hadn't been anything sinister going on in the orchard, after all. Lady Anna was clearly a creative spirit, and maybe that played out in her gardens and the names she gave to her flowers and trees.

I was too awestruck to speak. Vines of bright pink flowers danced over a wrought-iron arbor. I recognized them immediately as the very same variety, bougainvillea, that grew in Greenhouse No. 4 at the New York Botanical Garden. Just beyond, two potted trees stood at attention- a lemon, its shiny yellow globes glistening in the sunlight, and what looked like an orange, studded with the tiniest fruit I'd ever seen. "What is this?" I asked, fascinated. "A kumquat," she said. "Lady Anna used to pick them for the children." She reached out to pluck one of the tiny oranges from the tree. "Here, try for yourself." I held it in my hand, admiring its smooth, shiny skin. I sank my teeth into the flesh of the fruit. Its thin skin disintegrated in my mouth, releasing a burst of sweet and sour that made my eyes shoot open and a smile spread across my face. "Oh, my," I said. "I've never had anything like it." Mrs. Dilloway nodded. "You should try the clementines, then. They're Persian." I walked a few paces further, admiring the potted orchids- at least a hundred specimens, so exquisite they looked like Southern belles in hoop skirts. On the far wall were variegated ferns, bleeding hearts, and a lilac tree I could smell from the other end of the room.

In Bougainville, the only flower that grows is the Bougainvillea. In Gainesville, the only thing that ever gets lost are gains. In Gainesville they grow the status quo.

Practice resurrection. For me, this means forcing myself to be brave enough to enjoy simple pleasures with my family. I take long walks with Benjamin, pushing the stroller throughout the neighborhood and marveling at the gaudy excess of the bougainvillea. I bake honey wheat bread, listen to folk music, and tend the zucchini plants. I nurse my daughter, which is the most good and rightful thing I've ever done. I breathe. And little by little - baby steps - I invite the real God, the God of love, to banish my fear. How good life is.

THE FIRST TIME she left the house with her sleeping son in her arms, still unsteady on her legs, gripping the railing tightly, she surveyed the yard, astonished. It was at once familiar and strange. Something was different, though she could not immediately put her finger on it. The morning sun beamed through the bushes. The leaves of the banana plants seemed greener, their fruit larger and yellower. The hibiscus and the bougainvillea had never looked so beautiful. A warm breeze caressed her skin. Maung Sein was perched on a log below her, chopping kindling. Stroke by stroke he would split branches as thick as a fist. The uniformity of his movements radiated something infinitely reassuring. Nu Nu looked at Ko Gyi in her arms. He had her nose. Her mouth. Her cinnamon skin. She cautiously took one of his little hands. It was warm. And would always remain so. Suddenly he opened one blinking eye, and then quickly the other. He had her eyes, too, without a doubt. Ko Gyi regarded his mother earnestly, intently. She smiled. His deep brown eyes did not move. They looked for a long time at each other. Then a quiet smile drifted across his face. No one had ever smiled at her that

When the rains finally came that drought year, Beka's Dad tried to persuade Lilla to concentrate on bougainvillea, crotons, and hibiscus. Plants like these grew easily and luxuriantly in the yard, but Lilla kept those trimmed back, and continued to struggle year after year in her attempt to cultivate roses like those she saw in magazines which arrived in the colony three months late from England.

You have to live... Violet... you have to live... be free... from the bottom of my heart... I love you. — Gilbert Bougainvillea

She murmured their names under her breath as much to reassure herself as anything else... brilliant orange strelitzia--- birds of paradise--- purple aster, a deep magenta bougainvillea, hellebores, camellia, pelargonium and delicate viola in the shade there... the familiar words a salve to her sorrow.

Not so long ago, on a trip to Morrison’s Cafeteria, she talked incessantly for the full twenty-minute drive. I blew up and told her it was wrong to keep a running monologue, selfish not to leave any space for my response. Her face went red, as if I’d seen right into her liver and heart. She knew what I saw: someone who had lost her friends, someone who told them her secrets, and thus she withdrew, or they from her, as if direct talk about, say, her dead twin brother or her gay son named after him were too much for anybody to take. I cannot be her husband. She must know I can’t accompany her to Home Depot forever, pour shock into the hot tub, fertilize bougainvillea by the downspout. But does she say she can take care of herself on her own? That would be expecting too much. She puts her arms around me so I will feel the consequence in my body, the consequence of her losing once again. And I hug her back even harder in my attempt to do the impossible: push dark feelings out of her and leave light in their place. Maybe she thinks, Why should he get all the freedom I don’t have? Go to grad school, come back home, go off for a fellowship. Why should his happiness spring from, depend upon, my disappointment? What kind of logic is that? Do you think I’m going to die, Mom? Is that why you’re sad?

bougainvillea.

It was a fairly large house, larger than all our previous dwellings. There were two pinkwashed, picture- windowed, orange gable-roofed storeys, encompassing eight rooms, and an adjoining, presently shuttered garage. A friendly, unsymmetrical house, with pink bougainvillea hanging over the iron-lace decorated, semi-circular front porch and ivy climbing from the walls to the uneven gables.

Do you know what gardenias smell like?” “Yes.” “That’s what it’s like to be glad. You wake searching for the smell of gardenias. Or the smell of oranges. Or the smell of agaves. Or the smell of rosemary. And you think, God, I can smell. And you walk out and you see the light falling on everything—on the delicate leaves of a mesquite or the brilliant white of an oleander in bloom that almost blinds you or the bougainvillea that explodes pink like a firecracker. And you think, God, I can see.

The sun suddenly whitened his back like flour as he leaned over the railing, pressing down the smouldering magenta bougainvillea that feathered its edges.

At the height of their love affair, they had bought this house, a quaint little home with a patch of a garden, the gnarled bougainvillea tree blooming furiously, the only adornment there and the dual parking.

I’m thankful to be here. I’m thankful for the tire swing. I’m thankful for the Brazos river. I’m thankful for that turkey bow tie Doc’s wearing. I’m thankful for the time I’ve spent in this garden. I’m thankful for the honeybees. For the Stapleton record collection. For Clipper. I’m thankful for all the bougainvillea everywhere. I’m thankful to have seen what a real, loving family actually looks like. And I think… I think just because you can’t keep something doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it. Nothing lasts forever. What matters is what we take with us. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to escape. I’ve spent too much time on the run from hard things. But now I wonder if escape is overrated. I think, now, I’m going to try thinking about what I can carry forward. What I can hold onto. Not just only always what I have to leave behind.

Before independence, most Jaipur families lived in cramped family compounds inside the old Pink City. But generations of Singhs had always lived on an expansive estate outside the city walls. They were from the ruling class—rajas and minor princes, commissioned army officers—long used to privilege before, during and even after British rule. The Singh estate was on a wide boulevard lined with peepal trees. Eight-foot-high walls spiked with glass shards protected the two-story mansion from view. A marble veranda, overhung with bougainvillea and jasmine vines, extended along the front and sides of each story, and cooled the house in summer, when Jaipur could get as hot as a tandoori oven.

Matt powers his Register-burdened Heavy-Duti south on Glenneyre, hitting his targets like a quarterback—the Raiders’ Daryle Lamonica maybe, his favorite—throwing four quick completions to the Heun, Parlett, Cabang, and Rigby houses before heading up Legion, around the high school, and onto Los Robles with four more completions, one of them a bomb to the very tough Murrel house, hidden behind a defensive front line of blooming bougainvillea.

led them to a warren of walkways around a garden. It was beautiful, with varieties of aloe, hibiscus, oleander and bougainvillea growing in beds dug among the spiky grass and filling the air with glorious scents that were only heightened by the midday heat.

Bougainvillea hung like purple lamps. The air was sweet and warm.

Scaling the sheer cliff, he found bliss through reckless endangerment to his immortal soul. Did he care? No. Not even if he had to burn in hellfire for eternity. I backed into the rock wall, a chameleon, variegating with the landscape beyond the bougainvillea. Hidden in the shadows, a voyeur, a seeker of life’s truths, I gambled my soul like the man and woman who cherished each other’s touch.

In another life, we might have spent this evening nestled in a corner table at some café, drinking good Bordeaux, listening to Chet Baker, discussing hypothetical trips to the Greek islands or the construction of a backyard greenhouse where we would consider the merits of growing a lemon (or avocado?) tree in a pot and sit under a bougainvillea vine like the one my mom planted the year I turned eleven, before my dad left. Jazz. Santorini. Lemon trees. Beautiful, loving details, none of which matter anymore. Not in this life, anyhow. That chapter has ended. No, the book has.

That’s okay, a phone call is fine.” I point toward my mom’s room. “Also, could you make sure she gets a second rice pudding? She looks thin to me.” Outside, I take several deep breaths. It’s twilight and the wind has picked up, shaking the palm trees and bougainvillea. Someone in the apartment complex next door is sautéing onions. I hear a baby crying; children are playing in the park across the street. Before I leave the parking lot, before I even turn the car on, I’m searching nonstop flights to Rome.

As the late sun descended into the ocean, it seemed to trail ragged strips of black cloud with it, like a burning red planet settling into the Pacific’s watery green rim. When the entire coastline was awash in a pink light you could see almost every geological and floral characteristic of the American continent tumbling from the purple crests of the Santa Monica Mountains into the curling line of foam that slid up onto the beaches: dry hills of chaparral, mesquite, and scrub oak, clumps of eucalyptus and bottlebrush trees, torrey and ponderosa pine growing between blue-tiled stucco houses, coral walls overgrown with bougainvillea, terraced hillside gardens filled with oleander, yucca plants, and trellises dripping with passion vine, and orange groves whose irrigation ditches looked like quicksilver in the sun’s afterglow. Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons.

I had almost forgotten about the bougainvillea, how bright they are, explosions of pink climbing the stucco walls, and how soft the light is in the afternoon, how it makes the colors seem magically deeper and it really does feel like anything is possible. For a long time, that light was enough to sustain me there. [in Los Angeles]

Cosima lines up all her little jars of dried herbs and flowers, then carefully picks the ones she needs. "Acacia, for secret love. Celandine, for joys to come. Bluebell," she whispers, "for constancy. Bougainvillea, for passion. And chrysanthemum, for truth." She finds her special ceramic baking bowl and begins to add the usual ingredients: flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. "And the only flavor strong enough to mask the flowers." Cosima opens the cupboard above her head and takes down two bars of the finest dark chocolate she's ever tasted. "Ninety-nine percent. Perfect." After she's grated a beetroot, for moisture, and added vanilla pods, for extra flavor, Cosima pours the dark, thick mixture into a small baking tin and slips it into the oven. An hour later, she cools the cake, then glazes its black (with a tint of purple) surface with a chocolate icing seasoned with a little dust of daffodil, passionflower, and cosmos: new beginnings, faith, joy in love and life.

At the side of the house, where a bougainvillea growing on to the roof made a sort of arbor, a dozen skulls were fixed to the wall. Animal skulls, pale as driftwood, bleached to sea-shades against the powder-blue plaster. The centerpiece was obviously the skull of a horse. There were others whose shapes suggested the flesh in which they had once been embedded: a dog, a rabbit, and more I could only guess at - rat, lamb, lizard, mole. The way they were arranged, with the horse in the middle and the lesser creatures above and below, each in its proper station, the beaked birds under the rafters, the head of the dog at a height that invited you to scratch its ear although its jaw was dropped to snap at your ankle, made them less like trophies than ghosts, passing through the wall that instant, hungry for meat and grass, for air and company, breaking back into the realm of the living. One of the skulls had small, pointed horns, darkly whorled, as shiny as enamel. Suspended in the eye socket of the horse was a pocket watch with its hands hanging down, defeated.

There are some paintings in this room. Come see." The hallway was a mirror image of the one upstairs, following the length of the E, but this floor was more luxurious, with more golden wood on the walls. "Here," he said and pushed open a creaky door to reveal a room as lush and surprising in all the rot as a blooming bougainvillea in a desert. Time and ruin showed here, too, but even so, the colors were visible- patterns and embroidery and exuberant fabrics. Paintings of a dozen sizes crowded together on the walls, the frames thick with dust and strings of cobwebs, paintings of peacocks and tropical landscapes and portraits of exotic people- a sultan in a harem, a tall dark-skinned woman with dark eyes as mysterious as a deep lake, a tiger lolling on a carpet amid a crowd of beautiful women.

green duplex in the side yard of an elderly woman’s home, smothered by pygmy palms and a fuchsia jungle of flowering vines. The landlady was eighty-two and stalked through the yard with a machete in her hand scanning for bougainvillea to hack back.