I have over thirty house plants. Some are big. Some are little. They live in almost every room in our house. It’s just been in the past couple of years I started collecting house plants and I’m completely fascinated by them. I love watching them grow. My daughter helps me water them and I put many of them outside in the summer.
I have a snake plant that is just gigantic. We named him “Stanley”. We put him out on our front porch in the summer and it takes both my husband and I as well as a little dolly to move him. He was my very first house plant a few years back.
Last night we had a snowstorm — five inches which is a record for a snowstorm in April in Northwest Ohio. I was so sad. We have tulips all over our yard and when the snow started to fall I ran outside with scissors and cut them all. We’re expecting a hard freeze tonight so I brought them inside and put them in water. At least we will have the flowers for a few more days.
It was a surprise getting snow after already having a couple days in the 80’s this month but in Ohio, you begin to expect the unexpected. I’m absolutely fascinated by the weather and I live in the perfect place for that. Our winters are cold and windy, our summers are humid, and spring and fall are just unpredictable. Not to mention Toledo falls in the Hoosier Tornado Alley.
Plants. Weather. These days I’m feeling a little more connected to nature. Any other atheists feeling that way? You got to admit, science and nature are absolutely awe-inspiring — especially when you take god out of the picture.
Some of the tulips I cut.
I have what another commentator on another blog not so far away dubbed a “black thumb”. It’s the opposite of a “green thumb”, albeit I have shaken hands (pre-pandemic) with people who do have a green thumb and we’ve not mutually self-annihilated, so it’s not opposite in the sense of anti-matter.
Anyways… It doesn’t matter what I do, or don’t do. The house plants die. It doesn’t even matter what house, this has always happened. I water the silly things. They die. I don’t water them. They die. I give them some food. They die. I don’t give them some food. They die. I try to transplant them from the pot to the garden (or a bigger pot). They die. I don’t transplant them. They die. I leave them in a sunny spot, or a warm spot, or a shady spot, or a cool area, on the ground or patio or window still or in a hanging pot, indoors, outdoors, or even in at least one case, growing on the wall. They die. I haven’t tried to accomplish a “contrarian” effect by deliberately killing them (except maybe in some long-forgotten biology lab class?), probably because they would still die. One plant survived several years until the fecking flying rats (pigeons) decided to rip it apart and use the pieces as nest-building materials to make more flying rats.
I can walk by plants without obviously killing them, and even work in an office where other people take care of the plants, without killing them, so I’ve either got a very selective PlantZapPewPew or the bloody things just don’t like being taken of by me.
So about the only thing I’ve said to a plant is to ask it not to die, and then some choice words when it does (except when dismembered by flying rats, who got a long string of very LOUD ripe choice words).
I sometimes threaten my basil, as I pull a leaf off.
Thirty house plants is a lot, but I must say we have fifteen to twenty in every room in the house of five rooms.
Wednesday I have finished re-potting outdoor bonsai, of which I have about fifty.
I do like my plants, but I am not talking to them. Partly because there’s so much work to be done that I am constantly out of breath 🙂