Tag: bonsai

On feeding the houseplant fever

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And how I learned to stop fearing and murdering houseplants.

Orchid no. 4. Birthday gift from @montgomeryjewelry! #inlove #houseplantfever
Orchid no. 4. Gift from Tara and Andrew.

My obsessions come and go and stick with me in various, minute forms. My most enduring obsessions are dogs, and as of last year, plants — specifically houseplants. (As a genetic side note, I inherited my love of dogs from my father, and my love of plants from my mother.)

I killed — either by neglect or by over-attention — every houseplant I had in the first two years of our marriage. Including a spider plant that my boss gave me, with the caveat, “Not even you could kill this plant.” But I did. I was quick to term myself as a person with a brown and/or black thumb.

The maidenhair lives. Miraculously. #houseplantfever
My most finicky plant: The Maidenhair. She will wilt if you even look at her funny.

But then I decided I should actually start learning and caring about these living things, and so I did what I always do: Read all the books! I read every book our public library had on houseplants, and, imagine that, some extra knowledge helped. I am killing far fewer, and I daresay some plants are even thriving under my amateurish attentions.

My plant obsession continues to nearly untenable levels. (I started a houseplant inspiration board on Pinterest. Yes. Oh, my, yes.) Thankfully, some of the plant fever is spreading outdoors. Guion takes care of the practical plants (e.g., vegetables, herbs, hops, fruit trees), and I have taken charge of the ornamental plants (landscaping the front yard, choosing plants). It is a good system.

The main things I’ve learned about houseplants

  1. Get to know the conditions of your home. If you have a very dry home, look for arid-loving plants, e.g., succulents. If you have a humid home, look for ferns and tropical plants. If you’re somewhere in between, like most of us, find those versatile, hard-to-kill specimens that seem to thrive anywhere.
  2. Learn about light. Plants want light in various forms; get to know your plant and what it likes, and get to know your home and what kind of light it offers throughout the day.
  3. Plants die for two reasons, generally: (1) too much or too little light, or (2) too much or too little water. If your plant looks sad, it is probably a light or water situation, or both.
  4. Stay on a schedule. I water (almost) all of my plants on Sunday morning. This, more than anything else, has kept me from killing. Without a consistent watering schedule, I am liable to forget when I watered last, and either overcompensate with water or let the plant dry out and suffer from neglect.

Recent acquisitions

I used all of my birthday money on plant-related things. Gran gave me a gift card to Etsy, and I bought this beautiful handmade ceramic hanging planter. I spent an absurd sum at Fifth Season, my houseplant oasis. (Local people: If you are feeling stressed about your life, just go walk around Fifth Season. You will feel better when you leave. And you will probably leave with a plant.)

Plants recently added to the family:

Oh, yeah. And I jumped on the fiddle leaf bandwagon. #houseplantfever
Jumped on the fiddle leaf fig bandwagon.
New houseplants (pothos)
Pothos, to be hung in our bedroom.
New houseplants (million hearts)
Million hearts plant, to be hung in the living room.
New houseplants (jade plants)
Two jade plants for the kitchen table.
New houseplants (haworthia)
Haworthia for my studio.
New houseplants
Succulent for the living room.
New houseplants (English ivy)
English ivy in a basement window.
New houseplants (fittonia)
Fittonia (aka nerve or mosaic plant) in windowsill.
New houseplants
Plants to be hung, along with Guion’s seedlings.

And Windy gave me a magnificent birds’ nest fern (Asplenium nidus) for my birthday, which I haven’t had a chance to photograph yet. So, yes. I think I have reached my limit. For now…

Fifth Season = personal plant heaven. #charlottesville #fifthseason
Bonsai section at Fifth Season.

Heads up: I think bonsai trees are going to be my next obsession. Just wanted to declare that to the world.

No faith in your own language

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Irrationally proud of myself for coaxing this #orchid to re-bloom.
Orchid No. 2 is about to bloom again!

Sunset
Louise Glück

My great happiness
is the sound your voice makes
calling to me even in despair; my sorrow
that I cannot answer you
in speech you accept as mine.

You have no faith in your own language,
So you invest
authority in signs
you cannot read with any accuracy.

And yet your voice reaches me always.
And I answer constantly,
my anger passing
as winter passes. My tenderness
should be apparent to you
in the breeze of the summer evening
and in the words that become
your own response.

♦

I think this poem is about God, but sometimes I think it is about marriage too.

We’ve been married for three-and-a-half years now. Sometimes we don’t listen to each other. Sometimes we forget to pray. Sometimes we don’t take the time to stop and assess how the other one is genuinely doing. Three-and-a-half years is comparative blip of time, a twitch of an eyelid. Sometimes it feels like ages; sometimes it feels like we’ve only been married for a few days.

We like to ask each other questions at dinner. What kind of restaurant would you be the proprietor of? If you had to spend an entire week with a relative (excepting immediate family), who would it be? What high school friend do you wish you were still in touch with? If you could have any artist write a review of your masterpiece, who would it be and what would they say?

And we listen to each other’s answers, our eyes open, surprised by this person sitting in front of us.

The fermentation master is back in the game. #coldmuch #kombuchaforeveryone
Starting kombucha again.

♦

Lately, I’ve been waking up in the middle of dreams. It is a disorienting experience, and one of the consequences is that the half-finished dream sticks with me throughout the day. Today, for instance, I can’t stop thinking about how Kelsey is going to get all of that molten silver out of her hair, and why it is that Rebecca, my BFF from elementary and middle school, decided to marry a morbidly obese man simply because he wrote her a letter on a piece of yellow notebook paper. When conscious, I had to remind myself, “Kelsey’s hair is OK. Rebecca is already married.” But part of me still thinks that reality is awry.

♦

My fleeting obsessions* in 2013:

  • Ballet
  • Houseplants
  • Fashion
  • Interior design
  • Real estate

(*I define “obsessions” as topics that are suddenly deeply fascinating to me. I then go and read armfuls of books on the subject at the public library and start consuming blogs and websites on said topic, until it eventually ceases to hold my interest. The only two obsessions that have never failed to captivate me are reading and animals, specifically dogs. For the rest of my life, I will be obsessed with books and dogs.)

I wish my obsessions would trend toward more useful things, like personal finance, basic math, the tax code, or local politics. But, alas. I am only interested in the inconsequential.

I’d like to see myself get back into foreign languages, personally. I only practice a little Japanese during my weekly meeting at work, in which I take notes in a mix of hiragana and bad kanji. (I’ve forgotten so much. Gomenasai, sensei.) I’d like to refresh Japanese and take Level I French. I think I’m ruined for other languages, though. I once tried to speak a line of French in front of a French person, and she said, “Hm. Weirdly, your French has an… Asian accent.”

As an extension of one of my 2013 obsessions, I think I’d also like to get obsessed with bonsai.

What do you think I should be obsessed with in 2014?

♦

For Courtney, because she asked.

At April’s end

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Life has been busy and enjoyable. Haven’t had a lot of energy for blogging here, but I think of it from time to time.

We’re adapting to our new foster, Rainer, and he is adapting to us. He is a very sweet, gentle, shy gentleman, definitely the easiest foster we’ve had so far.

Rainer in golden light

We’re taking charge of the weed situation in the garden plots. There’s this one pernicious weed that spreads everywhere; it has roots that sprawl out, nearly two feet in length. I think it’s ground ivy (glechoma hederacea), and it’s driving me crazy. (The description of it is “a very aggressive lawn weed.” That sounds about right. It’s like the Hun army.) We also need to deal with “the snake pit,” our name for the old wood pile outside the fence, which is very likely infested with snakes.

I am continuing my latest obsession with houseplants and reading stacks of books from the library about them. (There’s one with the best subtitle, and applicable to my situation: “Never Kill Again!”) I’ve also found a whole host of houseplant blogs. There is a blog for every imaginable niche topic; I do really love that about the blogosphere. (If I ever started a houseplant blog, I’d call it Never Kill Again?)

I think my plant interests are also refining themselves, based on the climate of our hovel: I am going to make orchids and tropical-friendly plants my purview. My happiest plants right now are my phalenopsis and my schefflera. As much as I love succulents, I think I will have to relinquish my desire to grow them; our house is just too humid and lacking in bright light. They may be able to live in the sunroom, but I think that’s the only place they’ll survive.

Plant wish list:

Making slow progress with Anna Karenina, but every minute of it is deeply enjoyable.