Wild Tobago

At the very centre of the Central Range, the heartland of Trinidad, a forest is re-growing. Part of this forest is the Ajoupa Pottery Garden brought back from barren scrub by Bunty and Rory O’Connor for 35 years. Bunty O’Connor tells Pat Ganase what it took to recreate a garden in Chickland. (Photos courtesy Bunty O’Connor)     Rory and Bunty O’Connor and their three children moved from Cascade and Santa Cruz to Chickland in Trinidad’s Central Range in 1989.   They had bought piece of Les Lilas estate last owned by Charles Melizan with the intention to survive the recession by creating a pottery business. For two decades, Ajoupa Pottery produced bowls, mugs, mini ajoupa houses and other wares that were sold throughout the Lesser Antilles. The potter now devotes her time to artworks: mosaics, murals and clay creatures celebrating life in a forest. The most serendipitous legacy of Ajoupa may be the re-generation of a garden on five acres of a Centra...

On June 8, celebrate World Oceans Day with your own thanksgiving and tribute to the waters that surround Tobago: a sea bath, a beach lime, a coastal clean up, an exploration along a nearby shore. For the rest of the year, adopt some of these practices to protect and conserve the ocean from where you live and work. (First published in Newsday Tobago, June 7, 2018) The artist who created the clay plaque called “Famous Fish meets the King of Undersea World,” Bunty O’Connor, says that our familiarity and dependence on plastic – especially single use plastic – happened in the recent three decades. This is the story of her artwork, “That famous fish was a mylar balloon, the first I had seen. It floated up on Madamas beach (on Trinidad’s north coast) maybe 32 years ago. We were camping with the children. And hard to imagine, no plastic on the beach back then. I can also remember my first plastic red soap package floating in the sea in Charlotteville, maybe the same time or a little e...