Grateful Houseplants

(Although it feels frivolous to write about houseplants at such a sad and anxious time, I offer this post in the same spirit as those Italians who sang arias on their balconies at the peak of the pandemic.)

I like a grateful houseplant, the kind that perks up after a watering, and smiles greenly at me in the morning when I spritz it. Take the giant peace lily that I rescued from one of those big box stores just before the quarantine started. The margins of its leaves were being chewed up by an invisible pest or disease of some kind, but when I got it home I trimmed off the damaged bits and put it on a regimen of daily misting and weekly watering (it’s the only one of my houseplants that demands such frequent drinks). It promptly rewarded me by putting out a dozen shiny new leaves and even a couple of those weird white blossoms known as spathes. That’s what I mean by a grateful houseplant.

At about the same time, I also brought home a corn plant (Dracaena fragrans). It was an impressive specimen, taller than me, with thick, woody stems and several clumps of long, arching green-and-yellow striped leaves. Although the nursery tag did not mention this, I read online that I should never water Dracaena with city water. Even spritzing with it would cause the plant to develop brown spots that would expand until the leaf—and eventually the entire plant-- shriveled and died.

I looked at my Dracaena and realized that whoever had been caring for it in the store had not read those warnings, as many of the leaves were already speckled with tiny brown dots. The experts advised using distilled water, but that seemed both expensive and ungreen to me. The alternative was rain water. It doesn’t rain much in February in Vermont, but there is plenty of snow, so for weeks I scooped handfuls of snow into a bucket, brought it inside to melt, and used it to water and mist the Dracaena.

Along with the Dracaena I had also bought a lovely variegated Cordyline fruticosa, or Ti plant (what can I say? It was the depths of winter, and the plants were unbelievably cheap). Again, though the nursery tag didn’t mention it, the online pundits were unanimous against using tap water on the Cordyline, so I put it on the same melted-snow diet as the Dracaena, and expected that all would be well.

The spring sun finally melted the snow, and from then on at the first sign of rain I would rush out and put a bucket under the downspout. The rainwater seemed to be working, at least for the Cordyline, which was putting out bright pink leaves that mixed with green as they aged, to produce a lustrous coppery color. But the Dracaena did not react so well. The original brown pinpoints grew larger, and new spots appeared where my rainwater spritzes had landed. I rechecked the online sources, made sure I was doing everything right, and continued with the treatment.

When the Dracaena showed no signs of improvement, I moved it to the brightest spot in the sunroom, but it continued to droop. Day by day it looked more feeble, seeming to shrink into itself. I began to feel that I was running a houseplant hospice.

There is something about a sickly plant that drains the soul. Locked indoors with my dying Dracaena, I found myself avoiding the sunroom with its doom-laden atmosphere, and resenting the plant for not responding to my attentions. All my other green houseguests—the peace lily, the Ti plant, the aloe, the aglaonema, the jade, and the spider plants that I grow for Telemann to nibble—were glowing with health. But not the Dracaena. Every morning I would look at it, give it a few spritzes, and check the soil to make sure it wasn’t too wet or too dry. But the plant ignored me and continued to decline.

I could have simply gotten rid of it, but it was a living thing, and a large one at that. It had presence. For all I knew, it had feelings of some kind. I had brought it home and taken responsibility for it, and in exchange I hoped that it would bring badly needed cheer and vitality into my days. Like people who hesitate to euthanize a suffering pet, I clung to the expiring Dracaena.

And then one afternoon, in a fit of irritation not untinged with guilt, I dragged it outside, chopped up the leaves and stems, and scattered everything in the woods. Then I went indoors, sat down in the sunroom, opened my book, and basked in the aura of ease and contentment that radiated from my remaining, grateful plants.

Barbering the Jade Plant

Remember Miss Piggy, who never ate anything she couldn’t lift? Although I like the jungly feeling that I get from being dwarfed by my houseplants, I apply Miss P’s standard to them—I won’t keep a plant that I can’t lift.

I have an ancient jade plant that has spent its life putting out one plump, thumb-shaped leaf after another, its stems thickening and lengthening until they draped over the sides of the pot, like an obese sort of ivy. I am a parsimonious waterer, especially of succulents, but over the years I had poured countless gallons of water into that plant, and most of that water was stored in those fat stems, those turgid leaves. The monster was nearly three feet across, and its branches hung so far down that I couldn’t set it on a table, but had to use a plant stand.

Yesterday I moved the jade plant from the bedroom to the sun room.  I had to carry it at arm’s length to avoid breaking off any branches, and by the time we reached our destination my arms were shaking. (Later I asked my spouse to weigh the plant: 25 pounds—heavier than Bisou, even though it was in a light-as-air plastic pot.)

I saw right away that it was taking up too much room, crowding my beloved red and pink cordyline on the right, and the equally beloved giant peace lily on the left. I considered  moving one of the rattan arm chairs out of the room, but there is no space anywhere in the cottage for an extra chair.

There was nothing for it but to prune the jade plant. I got my small pruning shears and a two-gallon bucket and went to work on those overgrown branches. They snapped with a satisfying pop, and I threw them into the bucket. When I was only a third of the way through the pruning, the bucket was full. Leaves and stems flew everywhere as I kept turning the pot, lopping off more branches. Was there no end to this plant?

There was. When the last drooping branch was off, my plant was transformed. Gone was the unkempt Medusa look, the disconsolate stems, the leaves which, despite my conscientious misting, had accumulated layers of dust. Instead, here was a perky, young-looking plant, its every stem pointing optimistically towards the sky. Where leaves and branches had crowded and choked each other, there was now plenty of what painters call negative space, into which the soon-to-come breezes of spring could waft unimpeded. The plant looked and seemed to feel the way I used to look and feel after an excellent haircut.

I gave the jade plant an extra thorough misting and left the room, the pruners still in my hand. Passing by the hall mirror I caught sight of my hair, which drooped down to my collar bones, forlorn, disheveled, and crying out for a trim. I looked down at the pruners ….

The Prime of My Cat Telemann

My gray cat, Telemann, will be three years old next week. He has reached his prime, his peak, his zenith, his apogee.

 

I should have known, when I was signing his adoption papers and he jumped up and tried to grab my pen, that I was about to take home a certain kind of cat. But at the time, all I saw was kitten adorableness.

I was going to have a gray cat, just like the writer Colette,

whose last cat, la Chatte Dernière, was also gray. Maybe

it would help me write better! It would be glorious!

And in many ways, it has been.

In others, not so much. The last three years have been a continuous struggle to anticipate, outsmart, and outmaneuver Telemann. Every drawer in the house must be completely closed at all times, or he will pull out its contents. If I leave my laptop to get more coffee, I have to remember to put down the lid, or he will edit what I’ve written. And if you come to visit, do not, whatever you do, leave your purse where you can’t watch it, or he will scatter your belongings all over the floor.

But my main struggle with Telemann has been over houseplants. Now that I no longer have a vegetable garden, and the area around our cottage is too shady for anything more colorful than hostas, I depend on houseplants for my ration of botanical pleasure. The problem is, so does Telemann.

No matter what strategies I dream up, he defeats them. He is only a medium-sized cat, but when sufficiently motivated he can stretch his lean body like taffy and reach almost any spot in the house. And what he can’t reach by stretching he reaches by jumping, aided by the powerful muscles in his hind legs and fueled by the expensive diet of raw turkey prescribed by his vet.

When I brought a tall Dracaena home from Lowe’s a couple of weeks ago, Telemann set to shredding it at once. I surrounded the pot with a scat mat (a contraption that delivers a mild electric shock when touched) and for a few hours the Dracaena made itself at home undisturbed until Telemann figured out the angle of approach that would allow him to nibble the leaves without getting zapped. I sprayed the plant with a special herbal cat deterrent, and when that didn’t work, I swabbed it with undiluted peppermint essential oil. But Telemann nibbled on.

The thing is, the Dracaena, and the blood-red, sword-shaped Cordyline, and the gigantic Peace Lily I adopted at Walmart are all, according to the ASPCA, poisonous. I have watched Telemann closely for the slightest hint of drooling, gagging, nausea, vomiting, intestinal distress, and loss of appetite. But, in this endless war, if anyone is losing appetite it’s me.

I have lain awake nights trying to figure out ways to have both a cat and a few measly houseplants (is that really too much to ask?). And the only solution I have come up with is an exquisitely precise arrangement of each plant, at a specific height and distance from the furniture, that keeps it barely out of his reach, even at his most taffy-like. But if a table or chair is moved even a millimeter from its ideal placement, he’s on the plant like a vampire in the full moon.

Speaking of sleepless nights, I have, for various reasons, had more than my share of them lately. And that is when Telemann redeems himself. When I tiptoe out of the bedroom, he rushes miaowing to greet me as if he hadn’t seen me in a month.  He throws himself on his back and wiggles ecstatically in a kind of horizontal belly dance. If I stoop and tickle his stomach he seizes my hand with his teeth, but charmingly inhibits his bite.

He follows me as I head to my study, arrange my afghan on the cot, and stretch out with my book. When everything is in place, he leaps up and, tail held high, circles seven times before he settles on my sternum with his nose against mine. Then he purrs and kneads, purrs and kneads, spreading out his white toes and digging his nails into my skin.

With all this going on, I don’t get much reading done. But there is something about that rhythmic thrumming against my rib cage that soothes and relaxes me like nothing else can, and I soon put aside the book, turn off the light, and go to sleep.

Because of this and other charms (the way he comes when called, the killer way he stares at birds, his sudden yowling gallops through the house) I forgive Telemann for his plant depredations. I wish him a long, long life, and if he’s still with me at the end of mine, I hope for the comfort of his weight on my chest and his purrs in my ear, as I say goodbye.

Telemann and the Spider Plant

He glares down at me like a gargoyle from the top of the six-foot bookcase, lashes his tail, blinks. “What!” he says, and goes back to administering the death by a thousand cuts to my spider plant.

I have, since Telemann came to us from the mean streets of Philadelphia two years ago, disposed of most of my houseplants. The ASPCA’s list of plants that are toxic to cats lists 417 species (including, for some reason, catnip), so I am now down to a couple of citrus trees, a jade plant, and my once-flourishing spider plant, which is not poisonous because, if it were, Telemann would have died long ago.

When Telemann first arrived, the spider plant was busy making babies on a shelf in the sunroom. Swaying in the slightest breeze, those babies proved irresistible to a kitten who had, poor thing, until now been deprived of toys, stimulation, healthy food, veterinary care, love, and a warm home. As soon as he saw those plantlets, he knocked down a couple and ate them.

I moved the plant to the dining table, but by the next morning several more babies had perished. I thought that the sideboard would provide refuge, but it didn’t take long for Telemann to enact the botanical equivalent of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents.

I transferred the grieving mother plant to the highest spot in the cottage—the top of the tall bookcase in our bedroom. There wasn’t a lot of light there, but spider plants are tough, and after a while it started to look more cheerful. But that was before Telemann figured that it was only an easy five-foot leap (I made my husband measure it) from the nightstand to the plant. We covered the top of the bookcase with loops of packing tape, sticky side up, but that didn’t deter Telemann, who is probably the only cat on earth who doesn’t mind sticky tape on his paws.

Why are cats so amoral? Why do they do bad things and not care? Dogs try hard to be good, and if they sometimes fail, they suffer pangs of conscience. When Bisou used to do bad things, she always felt guilty. (Now that she’s ten, she hasn’t done anything bad in a long time.)

You’d think that after all I’ve done for him Telemann would let us have one measly spider plant to purify the air while we sleep. But reciprocity is not in his repertoire. If, as the cliché has it, dogs give humans unconditional love, cats expect unconditional love from us.

Still, despite his disastrous effects on my houseplants, I always manage to forgive Telemann, partly because in a weird way I admire his après moi le déluge attitude, his focus on his own desires, and his confounded nerve, which remind me of various autocrats, past and present. Luckily Telemann, with his velvety gray fur, little white paws, and slender body, is much easier on the eye. Plus he does have his sweet moments, when he becomes a purring, kneading machine, and exacts all the unconditional love I have to give.

Why I Love this Frigid Spell

1.  The dogs.  The cold revs them up, then knocks them out--they run like crazy when I take them out, then collapse in front of the wood stove while I get my work done.  Also, at these low temperatures the snow is powdery and dry, and does not form huge ice balls on Bisou's "feathers."  If there's one thing I hate, it's ice balls on a dog.

2.  The light.  Forget the solstice blues.  The sun on the snow makes everything as bright as a Mediterranean beach in the middle of June.  The geraniums in the sun porch are blooming their hearts out, the Meyer lemons are ripening, and spring is practically around the corner.

3.  The ticks.  I hope that they're having a hard time with these single-digit nights, and that we'll get a  break from the plagues that have followed the recent not-so-cold winters.

4.  The silence...

The Angel of the Killing Frost Comes By

Last night he descended on our hill, and with a touch of his icy blade felled the peppers and the eggplants and the nicotiana, and turned the unripe figs to frozen lumps.  I must remember to salvage the figs for the hens, who will appreciate them now that bugs and green grass are history.

 A couple of days earlier I had brought the two geraniums and the Meyer lemon into the house for the winter, and the five big lemons on the tiny tree are now slowly turning yellow next to a sunny window.

I also brought in the big pot of rosemary.  I forgot that I had given it a good watering the day before, and when I went to lift it it was so heavy that I almost dropped it.  But I have never yet dropped anything I've tried to lift, and once I've got something in my arms I am loath to call for help.  So I staggered and groaned and finally got the pot up the two steps into the sun porch where it will live until the spring.  And I thanked my lucky stars for my relatively short back, which has never "gone out" on me yet.  But in the future I must remember not to water the big pots before moving them.

It's time to wrap the Leyland cypresses in their burlap coats, to defend them not from the cold but from the deer.  Last winter, on the pretext that the wild apple crop had failed, the deer tiptoed right up to the house and munched on the evergreens.  This year has been great for apples--you can see piles of them littering the roadsides--but I'm not taking any chances.

I must also remember to put those plastic spiral trunk shields on the fruit trees before the rabbits start chewing on their bark.  And I have to figure out a way to protect the climbing roses against those same rabbits, though I can't see how I can wrap burlap around their thorny branches.  Maybe chicken wire?

Then it will all be done, except for setting up the bird feeder now that the bears have safely gone into their dens.  And then I too can finally--except for picking the chard and the kale, which continue to thumb their noses at the Frozen One--go into hibernation too.

Saving The Ivories

Just got back from an hour's communion with the spider plant in my dentist's office.  Since I find nothing more boring than talk about teeth--even my own--I will write instead about the spider plant that kept me company while the dentist and his assistant fought the good fight in the tiny battlefield of my mouth.

This was not a spider plant filled with joie de vivre.  It drooped in its hanging pot and was obviously deficient in Dylan Thomas's "force that through the green fuse drives the flower."  It disturbed me because my house is always in danger of being taken over by spider plants.  They ooze vitality and make babies by the dozen, and the minute I put those babies in water they send out thick shiny roots, and then I have to find homes for them. 

Spider plants being famous for purifying the air of pollutants and bad energies,  I wondered if the dentist's plant's failure to thrive was due to the pain and apprehension it was obliged to absorb day in, day out,.  But I'm almost sure that I did not, during my sixty minutes in the chair, personally add to its daily load of negativity.  I was so relaxed that in fact I wrote this entire post out in my mind and thought of a couple more topics to get me through the blogging week.  Plus, I was sending out waves of gratitude the entire time.

I don't like going to the dentist any more than you do, but whenever I'm there I imagine in vivid terms what my life would be like if, as has been the case for the human race during 99.9% of its history, I couldn't go to the dentist--a friendly, clean, well-trained 21st century dentist.  And I am overwhelmed with thankfulness.

In another age, by now I'd be missing a bunch of teeth, some of which would have fallen out as a result of calcium depletion during pregnancy.  But others would have dropped off only after days and nights of the kind of pain that obliterates thought and makes a living creature long for death.  My face would have that sunken look that one sees on witches in fairy tale illustrations, and my few remaining teeth would be crooked, wobbly, and yellow.  I would not be able to eat walnuts, or almonds, or pistachios. 

So I'm grateful that my cheeks are anything but sunken and that my teeth, with the help of dozens of dentists over the decades, are still clinging to my gums.  I'm grateful for the chair that tilts at the touch of a button, the piped in music that matches the blandness of the decor, the face masks, the rubber gloves, and the assistant who asks me if I'm ready for spring.  And I'm grateful for the hard-working spider plant, which looks like it is in urgent need of some spring sunshine.

And now for a negative P.S.:  One thing I am not grateful for is the arm-and-leg cost of all this, which is covered neither by Medicare nor by supplementary insurance.  I am grateful that I had an arm and a leg to give in exchange for having my tooth saved, but it is distressing to think how many people in America can only get this kind of care by sacrificing other necessities of life.

Sidewalk Nostalgia

This is the season when I yearn for sidewalks.  Lovely flat, hard sidewalks that don't give way under your foot.  Sidewalks on which you can wear regular shoes instead of boots.  Sidewalks that your dog can walk on without dragging home half a ton of--you know, that brown stuff that the earth and the clouds make together.

Its name is mud.

Mud season is in full swing in these parts, and our long, steep, unpaved driveway has never been worse.   Our Subaru is coated to the roof with a thick layer of mud and road salt, but I don't feel too bad about that because all the other cars (ninety-five percent of which are Subarus, the state car of Vermont) look the same.  I have often stopped myself just in time from getting into somebody else's mud-covered Subaru.  Recently my husband left ours--unlocked, of course, because there are some advantages to living in this mud-spattered state--in a parking lot, and when he got back found that the driver's seat was pushed all the way up.  Some poor woman (or a very short man) had gotten in by mistake, adjusted the seat, then realized she was in the wrong car and got out in a hurry.

The first winter I spent in Vermont I wondered why natives walked around with horizontal stripes of grayish, crusty matter on the back of their pants, right at calf-level.  This condition seemed to affect women in particular.  It wasn't until these stripes started appearing on my own pants that I realized that they were due to the back of the legs hitting the edge of the floor when one exits a  mud-and-salt-covered car.  Women, having shorter thigh bones, find it more difficult to get out without touching the edge.

But one good thing about mud season is how madly it makes one long for spring.  As Tristan and Isolde knew so well, half the fun is in the longing.  Accordingly, I bought three packets of spinach seeds today.  They are sitting on my kitchen counter waiting for tonight's snow.  If we get even an inch, I'll go out and plant them tomorrow.  I don't know for certain that planting spinach in the snow yields an earlier crop.  But I do know how good it makes me feel.

I also went into a frenzy of houseplant TLC. I installed a humidifier (better late than never) in the sun porch where my plants live.  I watered and spritzed and fertilized the geraniums which, bless their hearts, have bloomed non-stop all winter.  I did the same for the jade plant, the orchids, the lemon tree, and the giant pony tail plant which is beginning to look worried that its top is about to hit the ceiling.  I also watered the rosemary, and as usual it overflowed its drainage dish onto the slate floor, which I then mopped.

It was while I was mopping that I saw the ants.  A barely visible but determined column of them was marching up the side of the rosemary pot.  I don't normally rejoice at the sight of ants in the house, but today I did because, like the mud, they are an unmistakable sign that things are waking up out there.

Doesn't it make you crazy, how relative happiness is?

Compost And The Monk

A friend sent me a link to an interview with Thich Nhat Hanh (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/zen-master-thich-nhat-hanh-love-climate-change#skiplinks ).  In it the 86-year-old Buddhist monk, one of the world's foremost spiritual leaders, talks, among other things, about his own mortality:

"It is like the tea. When you pour the hot water in the tea, you drink it for the first time, and then you pour again some hot water and you drink, and after that the tea leaves are there in the pot but the flavour has gone into the tea and if you say they die it is not correct because they continue to live on in the tea, so this body is just a residue.  It still can provide some tea flavour but one day there will be no tea flavour left and that is not death. And even the tea leaves, you can put them in the flower pot and they continue to serve, so we have to look at birth and death like that."

And even the tea leaves, you can put them in the flower pot and they continue to serve... I could just see TNH using and reusing the tea leaves, then carefully dumping the residue into his African violet pot.  And it's true, tea leaves are the nectar of the gods to a houseplant.  I'm sure that TNH has champion African violets, what with all the tea leaves and his equanimous presence.

What I'm wondering is, where did this angelic figure learn about the benefits of tea leaves for houseplants--or do angelic beings automatically know such things?

Apparently this angelic being is deeply into compost.  When he learned that a temple in his native Vietnam was planning to build him a memorial, this was his reaction:

"I said don't waste the land of the temple in order to build me a stupha. Do not put me in a small pot and put me in there. I don't want to continue like that. It is better to put the ash outside to help the trees to grow."

Such a cheering thought:  compost as the means to resurrection.  What better afterlife could any of us aspire to, than to to continue to serve by helping the trees to grow?

Houseplant Season

This is the time of year when my houseplants reign supreme.  Deprived of outdoor gardening, I focus my considerable nurturing energies on the plants that live inside, with me.  I spritz them with tepid water once a day;  I whisk away the least dry leaf before it can fall to the floor;  and I have to hold myself back from over watering and over fertilizing.

As a result of all this attention, the scented geraniums look more lush now than they do in summer, which they spend on the patio.  The rosemary is surviving its indoor imprisonment, a considerable achievement for a captive rosemary bush.  But it's the orchids that provide the extravagance and the splendor of the Mardi Gras season.  Remember when orchids were strictly the province of wealthy connoisseurs?  Now every supermarket, every Home Depot, every Walmart has entire jungles of them, in all colors and sizes, for $19.99 plus tax.  I'm afraid that in a couple of seasons orchids will go the way of African violets, which once made us gasp with their profuse, colorful blooms and now, alas, barely elicit a yawn.

But in my house, where there are only two, the orchids still amaze me every time I look at them.  One reason that they seem so extraordinary is that the flowers, instead of growing at the tip of a vertical stem like daisies and geraniums, bend the long upright stem at a right angle and bloom along that portion of it, as if to make it easier for us to admire their magnificence. 

My favorite orchid lives in the bathroom, where it is continually bathed in humidity from the shower and from the spritzes I give it every time I go by.  It is rewarding me by putting out a remarkable row of large blooms, white except for the magenta bit in the center, whatever that is called.  The white parts, of course, are anything but white, and have suggestions in them of the entire spectrum, enhanced by a multitude of tiny diamond points that sparkle in the light.  Our bathroom is not large, and the orchid takes up a good bit of the counter, so that we bump into it as we use the sink.  But I can think of worse things than bumping into an orchid in full bloom when I go to wash my face.

I have always liked to live cheek by jowl with other life forms.  During my city-dwelling years, when the view out the window was more of cars and asphalt than of green things, I had plants on every sill.  For a time at work I shared a large office with a colleague, and I made myself a privacy screen out of palms and ficuses and ferns that I lugged one by one from my house to the middle of DC on the metro.  When I finished arranging the plants, I was practically invisible behind my green wall, and to find me visitors had to make their way, like tropical explorers, through waving, dripping fronds and bracts and leaves (I kept a spritzer on my desk).

One of the things I like best about houseplants is how manageable they are.  They stay in their pots.  They don't overrun other plants, and other plants don't overrun them.  They are not attacked by cutworms or Japanese beetles.  All the watering and spritzing and trimming can be done in a matter of minutes, in one's pajamas.  They never need weeding.  Best of all, like indoor cats, they are right there, in the most intimate spaces of the house, pieces of God's own wilderness tamed and contained for my comfort and delight.

Suddenly Summer

Well, it's hardly summer when the ground is still covered with snow, but the light more than makes up for the lingering chill. 

Oblivious of outside temperatures, my houseplants  know that it's spring.  The zonal geraniums are bursting in red and pink blooms;  the orchids are putting on their last show before going dormant for the summer;  the amaryllis is putting forth leaves by the yard.

Last night, as he has for as long as we've been married, the man I call the Daylight Savings Fairy reset all the clocks in the house as well as my watch while I slept.  This morning when the alarm went off I was dismayed by the darkness outside, until it dawned on me that the seasonal shift to lovely light-filled evenings had occurred.

To mark the occasion, even though the evening was chilly I took my book and glass of wine not to the living room sofa by the stove, but to the chair in the back porch, where I could drain the sunset to its very last drop.

Funny how it is just as enjoyable not to light a fire in the spring, as it is to light one in the fall.

Orchids

A hundred years ago, orchids were rare in our latitudes.  Wealthy and obsessive connoisseurs hired explorers to rip them off the dripping jungle trees to which they clung.  In the 50s and 60s, teenage boys would sacrifice a significant amount of their paper route earnings to buy a single, hideously beribonned bloom for their prom date.  But all that changed a few years ago, when someone figured out how to clone orchids.  Now they are everywhere, in supermarkets and superstores, as common as that other winter-blooming staple, the African violet.

You can buy great big orchids, with two-inch blooms soaring atop two-foot stems,  or medium or tiny ones.  I am enamored of my tiny one, which sits on the windowsill above the kitchen sink and has just produced a 3/4" bloom on a skinny six-inch stem.  The flower is white as snow, and like snow its color varies according to the light, from barely-there lime to delicate mauve.

I thought that if one mini orchid looked good on my windowsill, two, or even three, would look sensational.  But the supermarket where I bought it had sold out, and wouldn't be getting any more.  I called three other supermarkets, a garden center, a superstore, a home improvement store--nobody had mini orchids.  Overnight, they were gone without a trace.
 
But if the store shelves were bare of minis, they were crammed full of maxis, and I consoled myself by buying two of those.  If you are in the market for orchids, this is the time to buy them cheaply.  They are nearing the end of their winter blooming season, and stores don't want to be left with endless pots of generic green leaves.

My two plants were showing the stress of a long season in a big store--who wouldn't?  The flowers were mashed against the plastic sleeve that was supposed to protect them, and the leaves were forced into an unnatural vertical angle.  I held the orchids in my arms (my husband was driving) during the forty-minute trip home to keep their precious surviving buds from being damaged.

In the house, I cut off the plastic sleeves and picked up the spent blooms and dead buds that had collected on top of the dirt, then misted the plants with water.  The flowers and leaves stretched out and seemed to expand.  I could almost hear the orchids sigh with relief.

I put one in the bathroom, where it considerably dresses up that spartan space, and the other on a high shelf in the kitchen, well out of reach of Wolfie's scimitar tail.  And there, thanks to technological advance, they sit, cheering up my drab winter interior just as they once adorned Queen Victoria's conservatories.  Who says we're not blessed to live in this era?

Houseplant Season

Back in Vermont after a splendid Christmas with our assembled descendants, bags unpacked, dogs retrieved from their Club Med week at the Halfling B&B, I am now on the long annual slide towards spring.

Every year, as soon as Christmas is over, things take on a different look.  A spring look.  The day is a couple of minutes longer, a difference, my husband insists, that no one could possibly notice.  But I do.  I notice and take action, which means that at about this time, every year, I buy a houseplant.

This Christmas I received an amaryllis bulb, and yesterday, before even unpacking my bags, I opened the package from the nursery, read the directions, moistened the growing medium, nestled the giant bulb in it, and placed the pot by a south-facing window next to a zonal geranium that, as excited as I by the lengthening days (and by the sun reflecting on the Christmas snow) has put out a bright red bloom.

That amaryllis is getting a lot of attention.  Whenever I walk by it, I cannot help thrusting a finger into the growing medium to check for moisture, or giving the pot a quarter turn so every side gets equal exposure to light, or spritzing it with water.

This is the halcyon season for my houseplants, when, in the throes of gardening frustration, I coddle them and chat with them and give them baths in the kitchen sink.  And every year, I add to the collection.

Today in the grocery store, despite the pregnant amaryllis bulb waiting at home,  I couldn't resist a sprightly, bright-green little fern.  I also bought a miniature orchid that fits exactly on the windowsill above the sink, where it will never lack for moisture.

In March, as soon as I plant my spinach seeds in the snow, all my senses will turn towards the outdoors, and my interest in houseplants will begin to wane.  By June, when harvesting and weeding begin in earnest, I will wonder what possessed me to burden my life with houseplants that, after all, possess no edible parts.

But right now those little houseplants, as needy and useless and absurd as teacup poodles, are keeping me sane, hopeful, and focused on that long slide towards spring. 

Homestead Update

The houseplants get a lot of attention from me around this time of year, as I sublimate my gardening urges. I put the big ones in the bathtub and the smaller ones in the sink and give them all a tepid shower, followed by a shot of fertilizer. I prune the rose-scented geraniums so they won't get leggy. My ancient, plain-red zonal geranium has bloomed almost non-stop all season, and is even now putting out new flower buds. In my experience, indoor plants bloom better during snowy winters, because of the reflected light.

Everything looks good, except for the rosemary and the lavender, which are hanging on by their fingernails until it's warm enough to go outside. The floor around their pots is littered with needles, despite my careful waterings and daily mistings. The leaf drop is aggravated by frequent lashings from Wolfie's wagging tail.

In the barn, the battle of the goats and chickens continues. It boils down to this: any opening large enough for the rooster Charlemagne to go through is large enough for Blossom and Alsiki to get into the coop. We've tried taking down the chicken ramp (the goats jump in anyway); putting a bar across the opening to make it smaller (the goats can't get in, but Charlemagne can't get out); making a new, narrow ramp (if it's too narrow for the goats, the chickens won't use it either).

Ed's theory is that Blossom and Alsiki go into the chicken coop to gorge on laying mash, and it's true that they have been looking especially rotund of late. But my theory is that it's more complicated than that. Sure, the laying mash is attractive, But B & A, being goats, they enjoy the sheer fun of bursting into the coop, making the chickens flutter and cackle, knocking down the roosts, and scaring whoever is in the nest trying to lay an egg.

Today Ed went out with a set of calipers and measured the goats' muzzles. He tried to measure Charlemagne's head, but couldn't catch him, so he had to estimate. Then he took the chicken feeder into the basement and nailed pieces of wood across the opening that will keep the goats' muzzles out out while letting the chickens' beaks in.

We'll see. If Ed is right and the main motivation is food, Blossom and Alsiki will stop their forays into the coop. If, on the other hand, their goals are mostly social, as I suspect, we'll have to go back to the drawing board.

Blossom and Alsiki are hardy little creatures. Unless there's a blizzard, they're out and about in the snow, looking for entertainment. Tonight as I was making dinner I saw them standing on the pile of stones provided for their amusement, watching the sun go down. Blossom, the shy one, has discovered the pleasures of the human hand. If I'm petting Alsiki, she'll sidle up to have her belly scratched, and close her eyes in ecstasy. She still moves away if I reach for her, but that won't last long.