In Which I Euthanize An Orchid

I brought an orchid home from the grocery store last March, to help with the winter blues. It was an ordinary Phalaenopsis—you know, the ones that look like butterflies in flight. The blooms, four on each of two long, stiff stems, were the size of ping pong balls, white with purply pink veins in the center, and I thought they were magical. It was my first orchid ever.

I put it in a nice cachepot, in a light but not too sunny spot, and feasted my eyes on it for a full 48 hours. Then, with a single swish of his tail, Wolfie decapitated one of the two stems.

I refrained from scolding him—after all, it's not his fault if he's bursting at the seams with joie de vivre. The remaining stem was doing fine, and those flowers hung on until Thanksgiving. The same was not true, however, of the leaves, which should have been a deep green and turgid but instead were thin and wrinkled and had an unhealthy yellow tinge.

Plant books tell you that the most common cause of plant ills is overwatering, so I watered less. But the leaves looked the same. I went back to regular watering and one leaf turned completely yellow, so I cut it off. A friend who has a great hand with orchids recommended regular plant food (as opposed to special orchid food) to give the leaves a boost. But they continued to droop.

I was about to throw in the towel when, sometime after the last winter solstice, I saw two buds on one of the stems. The orchid was going to bloom! Full of hope, I misted it with special care, watered it, fed it, moved it to a warmer spot.

But that orchid could have been made of stone, for all the life it showed. The buds, still green, developed at a glacial pace. The leaves, still thin and wrinkled, worried and depressed me every time I looked at them. The plant might eventually flower, but how would it sustain itself with those sick-looking leaves?

This morning, at plant-misting-grooming-and-chatting-up-time, I faced my feelings. That orchid was giving off negative energies, and I was absorbing them. It had to go. And so, it went.

Meanwhile, on the kitchen windowsill, an ancient zonal geranium has been making poppy-red blooms all winter long. It loves showers, and every time I put it in the sink and run the hose over it, it rewards me with another bloom.

Geraniums are a peasant flower. They look good in rustic surroundings, next to stone and old brick. They go on and on no matter what, and manage to look cheerful unless they are at death's door.

Next winter (in Vermont it's never too early to start planning for next winter) I think I'll try having more than just the one geranium in the house. I'd especially like to have a bunch of those barely-pink ones (NOT the horrible salmony-pink kind) that are so hard to find.

In the meantime, just in case the barely-pink ones don't materialize, I'll try rooting some cuttings from my old red friend in the kitchen.

The Nose In Winter

Took advantage of a heat wave (35F and no wind) today and went for a ramble in the woods behind the house, with Wolfie.

The snow was deep, and the woods were silent. Wolfie led me to the remains—a few orange feathers on the snow—of the hen that died in early winter. I had given her an eco-burial by leaving her under a tree and hoping that some creature would make a meal of her. The snow all around the feathers was crisscrossed with tracks, mostly fox and coyote.

While Wolfie methodically smelled the feathers, the tracks, and the tree trunks against which something had sprayed or scratched, I smelled nothing. I heard nothing. In winter the ears, but especially the nose are largely deprived of stimuli by Nature. (The human nose, that is. The canine nose is never deprived of anything.)

Inside my house, however, it's a different story. This winter's challenge is to keep alive a large rosemary bush that I brought inside in the fall. Rosemary cannot survive Vermont winters outdoors, but it is almost as difficult to get it to survive indoors.

Because my plant-guru friend Dona had admonished me that rosemary hates to be moved, at Christmas we had to jam the tree in a less-than optimal corner, because I refused to upset the rosemary by moving it. A native of the semi-arid Mediterranean, rosemary promptly gives up the ghost if it is over-watered. On the other hand, the indoor climate in winter can be Sahara-like, and rosemary's needle-thin leaves will dry up and drop off even as you fill the watering can. Every morning, in my pajamas, I can be seen spritzer in hand spritzing the rosemary, trying my best to give the effect of morning dew, and looking for signs of trouble.

I am happy to report that, after some initial pouting, the rosemary has settled in for the duration, and covered itself all over with tiny azure blooms. But the best part of the rosemary bush is that when I stroke it, or when Wolfie whacks it with his tail, it releases the smell of a Mediterranean hillside.

Next to the rosemary huddles a smaller lavender plant that I brought inside because I felt sorry for it, even though certain kinds of lavender are supposed to be able to take the winters here. It's starting to look kind of scraggly, despite careful waterings and spritzings, but I think that as the light grows stronger in the south-facing sun room in which it lives, it will cheer up. Meanwhile, it too gives off that Mediterranean smell.

Then there are the lemon/rose-scented geraniums. Unlike the rosemary and lavender, these are practically indestructible. Give them a bit of sun and they will grow as if they had been designed by Nature to live indoors. To keep their bushy shape, I periodically pinch off their top leaves, which makes my fingers smell delicious. Then I carefully dry and store the prunings for future pot-pourris. I've heard that you can pour boiling water over scented-geranium leaves and make tea, but I haven't tried that yet.

Lastly, there is the orange peel, which I save and set out to dry in a basket on the dining room table. When it's brittle I snap it into tiny pieces and store it in an old blue canning jar, where it looks nice. Orange peel works well as a fixative for pot-pourri, and smells terrific.

Rosemary, lavender, orange, geraniums.... I forgot to mention my little laurel tree! In the midst of a Vermont winter, I am surrounded by the plants and smells of a Catalan summer. A small miracle, but it will help me survive until lilac-time.