Houseplants
Another hilarity-inducing email a few days ago: How many houseplants do you have? Do they all have names?
1. Lots.
2. NO.
To begin with, it depends on how you count. I have gazillions of geraniums, & most of them root so easily that if you want the bits you cut off not to root, you’d better bury them in the compost heap immediately. But when you know that all you have to do is put the lopped stems in water & they’ll promptly grow roots & if you then plonk these little waving rootlets in something resembling compost you’ll have another plant . . . even if your windowsills are already full* . . . I mean, aren’t you kind of committing low-level Plant Murder if you don’t put them in water & let them grow roots & become More Plants? So the gazillions produce more gazillions.** There’s one called Appleblossom, except that there are at least half a dozen not quite identical geraniums out there called Appleblossom, all of them variations of pale pink & double, so the flowers look like tiny roses, right? So I am a trifle besotted. & it’s one of the ones that roots really easily. I have many (slightly various) Appleblossoms.
But the geranium that is taking over the house is one called Mr Wren. The garden centres that sell it-on & off line-warn you that it gets leggy, but the flowers are so engaging-they’re single, but they’re red with a white border & totally adorable. But golly don’t the plants just get leggy. You want a nice bushy geranium, nice big green leaves & lots of them, with a rich scattering of flowers. Appleblossom does this. Mr Wren does not. Mr Wren doesn’t really believe in leaves. Maybe it thinks it’s a kind of flowering bamboo? Tall straight knobbly stems . . . I don’t know of a bamboo with red-&-white flowers, but I’m not much of a botanist. I’m a, Ooh! Shiny!, sort of gardener.
With the result that I am forever lopping off yet more Mr Wren stems, putting them in water, & starting over. I have an entire windowsill upstairs that is almost nothing but Mr Wrens, all jammed together & tangled up with each other. & every time I water them there’s at least one more that is nearly as tall as I am*** with loooooong bare green stems & a glorious little bright clump of red-&-white flowers twinkling at the top. Arrrrgh. Oh, the Plant Books will also tell you not to bother trying to root a flowering stem, because it won’t. It’ll finish flowering & die. You are supposed only to put non-flowering stems in water. Mr Wren didn’t get this memo. Mr Wren rarely produces nonflowering stems anyway. Which would have solved the surfeit of Mr Wren problem before it got started. But . . . I was going to say that when I bought my first Mr Wrens† I didn’t know you couldn’t root flowering stems. I think it’s more that you-okay, I-look at that long bare green stem & can’t resist just having a go . . . it’s not like (another) glass of water takes up that much space.††
. . . Okay, this is clearly another continuing series.††† But I’ve had a quick cruise around the house, & not counting Mr Wren, & only counting half the Appleblossoms, I have probably . . . um . . . in the general vicinity of ninety houseplants. NINETY. Good grief. Well, that certainly explains why they soak up so much time. Um. & I probably missed a few. No, I didn’t count Maude the Monstera twice or three times. & I only counted the trays of compost liberally studded with tiny short-stemmed things that may grow roots if given time as one, & the tray of hippeastrum/amaryllis bulbs ɸ I only counted once too, although there are about nine of them that will probably come to something.
That’s another story of my, um, unsystematic approach to houseplants. There was a SALE on random hipp/am bulbs, you get ten undersized ones in a sack for the price of one proper fat ready to pop one, with the allure that some of them will probably bulk up & flower some decade or other. One of the advantages of a big house-& a haphazard attitude-is that you can afford to stick stuff in corners & let it get on, or not. I managed to lose the sack, & had convinced myself that I must not have bought it after all, that I had had a sudden spasm of good sense & resisted. The spasm of good sense & the resisting didn’t seem very likely, but the sack, if it had ever existed, had disappeared. Which is the down side of a large house. Because A YEAR LATER I found the sack. & hey, the bulbs were all still solid, not squishy, so it can’t hurt to stick them in a tray with some compost?? Two of them flowered that year. We’re now coming up on the second year since I planted them, they’ve all got leaves, & one of these years I’m going to have more hipp/ams than I flapdoodling know what to do with. Maybe the secret to burgeoning hipp/ams is to lose them in a dark cupboard for a year. Oh, &? Hipp/ams produce bulblets. You carefully split these off & pot them on, & in another year or two they flower.
In a few more years I’ll have more hipp/ams than I do Mr Wrens.
* * *
* Hardy geraniums are a whole other animal, er, plant. We’re talking about the kind that have to live indoors in winter, &, in a haphazard household like this one, probably live on their windowsill year round. The Plant Books^ all tell you that your houseplants will enjoy a summer outdoors which will recharge their tiny green batteries for another shut-in winter. I don’t know why I keep buying plant books^^. Their chief purpose is to remind you of your inadequacies. How much reminding do any of us need?
^ Of which I have too many, it will not amaze you to hear
^^ Um . . .
** Of course the FANCY EXPENSIVE geraniums do not root easily in water. Occasionally you can winkle a cutting into producing roots & even more occasionally beguile it into not instantly dying when you put it in excruciatingly researched & chosen Best Houseplant Compost^. I was once thrilled at my success . . . till the little ratbag produced the wrong flowers. I still don’t know what happened. It wasn’t something obvious like that I’d mixed up my cuttings;^^ whatever these were, they weren’t any of my other, easy rooting, geraniums either. They were Something Else.
^ Ah, the internet. Life was simpler when you went to the garden centre & bought what was on their shelves. If it was an exciting, achievement-oriented garden centre it would have several brands of, for example, houseplant compost, & you could waste several minutes reading the advertising bumf & struggling with the nitrogen, phosphorus & potassium percentages,+ & then putting the nearest, the cheapest or the biggest/smallest bag in your basket. If it were a really go-ahead garden centre it would have a clerk you could ask plant & planting questions of & they would answer you instead of looking at you blankly, & possibly slightly warily, as if uncertain whether you might bite.++ Now we have the internet, & an infinity of sites of hours-eating advice, frequently contradictory just to keep it interesting, on any subject you want, or don’t want, to name.+++
+ AAAAAAAAAUGH. I don’t do numbers. This may be related to why I don’t do time. It does me, of course, but I don’t cooperate. I’d like to say I stand proudly & defiantly & shout You don’t own me! In actual fact it’s more I look up distractedly from what I’ve been doing for several hours too long & say, Huh?
++ Somewhat similar, perhaps, to the way I look at the clock or the timer or the setting sun# when I look up distractedly & say, Huh?
# or perhaps the blasted rising sun although it’s getting late enough in the year that if I’m seeing dawn I’m really in trouble
+++ producing even more moments of looking up distractedly & saying, Huh?
^^ Yes of course this happens. Duh.
*** Okay, so it is sitting on a windowsill
† A three-for-one DEAL!!! Clearly the garden shop was having the same proliferation problem I now know well.
†† Except when you already have about nine glasses of water with various things trying to root in them. It’s not like they’re only Mr Wren. I put almost everything^ in glasses of water, just to see if anything happens.
^ bits of green plant everything, okay? I don’t put dog hair or rocks off the shore or chocolate+ in glasses of water.
+ Especially not chocolate. 100% organic chocolate COSTS. I tell myself 100-year-old malt Scotch costs worse. Well, it does, but . . .
††† I haven’t counted how many have names . . . uh oh
ɸ I’d feel friendlier about the whole Latin nomenclature thing if the blasted botanists didn’t keep changing their minds from one impossible Latin mouthful to another impossible Latin mouthful. Peter used to tell me that Latin names are useful because then you always know what something is. NOT WHEN THEY KEEP CHANGING IT.
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