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.

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?

Snow Outdoors, Plants Indoors

I promised myself I wouldn't write about the weather today, but since it's reaching epic proportions, I'm sharing a photo of what it looked like this afternoon just outside the front door right after, A) the plow guy came through with a huge bucket loader and pushed the back the walls of snow so that, B) he could come back with the regular plow and clear the driveway.

The minute he left it started snowing again.  The wind picked up and it got markedly colder.  I made Lexi stay inside since there was ice under the snow and the footing was slippery.

Inside the house, all is calm, all is bright.  The zonal geranium is putting out blooms of a red such as I don't recall ever seeing in nature--but then I don't recall seeing anything much other than white in nature.

Despite the nursery's directions, I decided to treat the miniature orchid on the kitchen windowsill like a regular houseplant--namely give it plenty of light, let it get good and dry between waterings, and mist it daily during wood-stove season.  Today it rewarded me by finally opening one of its teensy greenish-white blooms.  My experiment with regular-sized orchids last winter ended tragically with the flowers being decapitated by Wolfie's tail, so I'm especially pleased by this little plant's survival.
  
I'm told that the nearest Walmart has big blooming pots of orchids for a laughable $12, and I'm sorely tempted to get a couple (maybe I could duct-tape Wolfie's tail to his hind leg?).  But the store is almost an hour away from here--which is a good thing--and the roads are iffy.  

Besides, the Amaryllis leaves are shooting up out of the bulb at the rate of a couple of inches/day, the flower buds will appear any minute, and orchids will probably feel superfluous then. 

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. 

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.