The heavy rains that have saturated St. John this year have caused major inconvenience for many residents—and terror and heartbreak for some who live in vulnerable areas. The most visible and dramatic effects of the inundation have been along St. John’s most costly and heavily engineered stretch of road: the

More than three decades ago, in the torrentially rainy final months of the 1970s, I got a job with the Grounds Department at Caneel Bay, never imagining the long and intimate relationship with plant life that this would lead to. The Cow-Horn Orchid (Schomburgkia-humboldtii) (Image courtesy of Eleanor Gibney) In several

For as long as I’ve been involved with the St. John Historical Society–and probably ever since the Society’s inception in the mid-1970s–we’ve wanted to have a logo: an image that evoked St. John’s history and culture and some of the unique attributes of both. The St. John market basket —

As I write this on a very wet and cool October night, another drenching tropical wave is passing over us. After 23 inches of rain in the past two months, this begins to seem normal. I can again hear the gut roaring in the distance, and I can anticipate another

Most people who have spent any real amount of time in the West Indies are at least vaguely acquainted with the small tree known as lignum vitae—a Latin name meaning “wood of life”, but oddly enough, NOT the tree’s scientific name: that would be Guaiacum officinale— from the Taino name

(Summarized By Robin Swank) SJHS members walked up newly restored steps to the Annaberg Country School on December 11th. Our ‘tea party’ was convened to dedicate new permanent educational signage on behalf of the three individuals who funded the educational signage by bequest and also gave of themselves to the

Until very recently, the most critical factor for human existence on St. John was water: How to collect it, how to save it, how to move it to where you needed it… These days, all that’s required is a cistern, and a few hundred dollars, and you can truck in

The guavaberry tree (Myrciaria floribunda) is a widespread species in Tropical American forests; found in the West Indies from Cuba down to Martinique, and on the mainland from the south of Mexico to Brazil. It is fitting, however, that the species was first officially described from a collection on St.

Eleanor Gibney’s maternal grandmother, Mildred Flagg of Boston, filmed home movies of her daughter and grandchildren on St. John on several visits to the island between 1947 and 1960. Robert and Nancy Gibney came to the West Indies from New York City in 1946. They were on their honeymoon, and

When the first Europeans landed on St. John, did they see a dramatically different landscape and vegetation from what we observe now? In the absence of detailed reports from that time, we have to make a lot of educated guesses. The early accounts that do exist are often misleading, perhaps