A while back, a friend of a friend asked me to come out to Mt. Helix to take a look at a lot they were planning on building their house on. They wanted some ideas for what to do with some of the existing vegetation. When I got to the site, the first thing I noticed was a big field of Bird of Paradise. And really, in addition to being one of San Diego’s finer neighborhoods, Mt. Helix originally was used extensively for flower growing and one of the things they grew was Bird of Paradise for cut flowers.