I’m breaking one of my own hard and fast rules. I’m posting pictures of my indoor plants on my blog. No offense to some of my loyal readers, but I generally eschew blogs from cold climate shut-in gardeners who revel in their Christmas cactus blooms and feel compelled to post a few hundred pics of them everyday whilst wistfully longing for the snow to melt and the crocus to pop up. As an aside, I also don’t care much for knowing what your cat vomited up this week or what’s going on at your quilting club. Call me a snob, but my plate spilled over long ago and I can only process so many blogging bits.
But I walked into my soon-to-be-laid-off-from office this morning and one of my hand-me-down orchids is gloriously blooming on the magical window ledge. I say magical because everyone in my building grovels in amazement at the ability of orchids and other shaggy plants to be resurrected in this space. Whenever a plant goes into cardiac arrest at their workstation, I receive a visit from a coworker asking if I can breathe life back into it. They figure that because I’m a landscape architect, I have a dusty tome of mystical incantations that bring plants back from the dead. I threaten to turn them into zombie plants that will stalk their cubicles at night, sucking the xylem and phloem from their languishing plants, but haven’t actually followed through.
What they don’t know is that my horticultural prowess is just the good fortune of having a great southeast exposure and the ability to detect when a plant is getting dry (lift it up – if it’s still heavy, it’s wet; if it feels light it’s dry). I also occasionally remember to put a few crystals of that hideously blue Miracle-Gro in the water once in a while. I know, I know – Miracle-Gro is just more petrochemical poison, but I had someone hand it off years ago and I’m too lazy to track down a good organic product. Hey, the same 6 oz. can has been serving me for a decade so what’s the harm.
With no further ado, I give you my window sill plants. No, I haven’t named them.
