Allan spoke of the bromeliad leaves as the perfect home for frogs, wet and sheltering, and clambered among them, pulling back the greenery. “Let’s see if we can see one, they like it here so much.” We peered down with him, then excitedly “Oh look, here’s one!”
Leaning in to the tiny bright speck of a green and black poison dart frog, it’s rooted to a spot as if paralysed by its own toxicity. His daubed body was a kaleidoscopically symmetrical swirl of mint green and black, and though no larger than my thumbnail, a diet of ants and mites produce a poison worthy of these lurid markings.
The frog sightings piled up after this. I’ve lost count of the number of Red-eyed Tree Frogs we’ve seen, posing postcard perfect on night walks with their splayed papaya flesh feet and blue stripes. Bull frogs the size of Sports Direct mugs bellowed brownly in the night, and glass frogs crouched minuscule and translucent under light. We saw the blue jeans of the strawberry poison dart frog, and tales were recounted of accidental touches and long nights of sickness. There were others, countless shades of tawny blowing out their throats and flattened onto leaves, and the unbelievable volume of their calls from a ditch beside the road, invisible in the brown watered greenery.
a year in the garden 