Down the 2300 block of Taylor Street, folks traversed yards and berms as wary as soldiers walking a mine field. ``Oh yeah,'' said Debra Williams, nodding across the street at the site of a disconcerting encounter with slithering exotica. ``We're all scared.''

Me? I bravely situated myself on an expanse of gray asphalt and pondered the latest evidence that South Florida has turned jungle strange.

Strange for North America, that is. Inhabitants of villages in Mozambique, Tanzania and Malawi would hardly give a second thought to news of a utility worker fallen into a neurotoxin swoon. The appearance of a cable guy would register more surprise than a deadly tree snake.

But most U.S. residents harbor the quaint expectation that gardening does not risk ambush from African death serpents.

Not here. Robert Ward carefully cleared unkempt brush away from his Taylor Street apartment building Friday and regarded the untrimmed yard of a neighbor with obvious irritation. The snake in question was the color of a well-fertilized lawn.

A BIGGER MAMBA

As mambas go, better green than the bigger, meaner, even more venomous black mamba. The cable guy, saved by the Miami-Dade Venom Response Unit and expected to recover, would have been in considerably more peril had he met the dusky cousin.

Somehow, that didn't seem so comforting as I walked, gingerly, through Hollywood's garden of death Friday. The day before an eastern green mamba popped out of a coconut palm and bit a 44-year-old Comcast worker on the arm. The path wound through bromeliads, bamboo, gumbo limbo, a mango -- a jungle tableau covered by a jade vine canopy.

The combination of herpetophobia and jade vines created frightening illusions. I stifled the urge to shout, ``Yo! Mamba!''

Darlene Ward scanned the garden from her balcony with binoculars but the snake stayed elusive, a camouflaged fugitive from justice.

Apparently, Hollywood's evanescent reptile was not among the 100 or so on the state's register of licensed green mambas. Capt. Ernie Jillson, the lifesaver who heads the venom unit, figured it had been purchased illegally off the Internet. Florida maintains strict rules about ownership of poisonous snakes, he said, but other states are lax.

INTERNET OFFERINGS

One mail-order Internet operation offers green mambas for $220, a spitting cobra for $120. Scary enough that any fool can buy a military assault rifle. Now we learn that a creepy (crawly) malcontent can add a pit viper to his arsenal with virtually no federal oversight.

Juxtapose that against Miami-Dade's death-defying plans to slash the budget of the region's only venom unit.

Rich Padrick, another resident of the Taylor Street apartment building with the lush, exotic (lately, very exotic) garden, admitted that the appearance of a deadly African reptile, most places, would seem bizarre.

But he lives in South Florida, a subtropical terrarium overrun by dumped lizards and discarded snakes imported by the exotic pet industry. A couple of years ago, in this same yard, he happened upon a ball python sunning on the fence.

Outside of South Florida, the appearance of a python in the garden would be quite enough. No need for a sequel by a green mamba to know we've slithered deep into reptilian weirdness.

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