January 18, 2004

• Houseplants

  
  

  notforprophet commented to my recent blog about the low indoor temps here that we probably don’t have any exotic plants in here, nor hamsters.

  
  

  He’s right about the hamsters.  Keeping caged prey would only tantalize the cats, and letting them run loose… well, the cats have enough wild prey as it is.

  
  

  I do keep tropical houseplants.  When I moved from Anchorage to the Su Valley in 1983, I brought many with me, surely more than a hundred.  At the peak, in the late ‘seventies when we lived in the Hillside area south of Anchorage and I was selling plants and macrame hangers for them at flea markets, I had more than 300 plants growing under lights in the south end of our little 8X35′ trailer.

  
  

  Few of the plants I brought out here survived the first winter.  Some euphorbias and their succulent cousins, and all my cacti, did survive right up until I left them in Greyfox’s care when Doug and I went on the Big Field Trip in ’93-’94.  I’d come to consider them unkillable, but Greyfox on his massive drunken binge managed to kill them all.

  
  

  Before I moved to Alaska, I’d given up on trying to keep houseplants.  I was successful with outdoor gardens but tended to kill houseplants with overwatering.  My second winter in Anchorage I told Charley I was dying to see some green.  He installed lights in an alcove in our apartment, and I hit the books on plant care.  Within a few years it was my biggest income source and I was collecting every species I could find.  I’ve still never managed, though, to find an Aspidistra here.  It would be ideal for our winters.  They’ll grow, I’ve heard, in a dark closet.  Victorians loved them, called them cast iron plants, had one in just about every hallway.

  
  

  I didn’t replace any plants after the Greyfox die-off.  When we moved in here to housesit there were none and I had none to move from the old place.  Our first summer here on the power grid, a former neighbor who was having a moving sale in the highway turnout where Greyfox had his stand gave Greyfox two unsold plants at the end of that weekend.  One was a jade plant, big, old and leggy.  The other was a chlorophytum, spider plant.  I put them in the bedroom when the days got short because that’s where the fluorescent lights were.

  
  

  When I became ill that winter, I forgot the plants.  It was the worst health crisis of my adult life.  I thought I was dying, even wrote letters to family and old friends, a final contact.  Rolling over in bed got me out of breath.  If the covers got caught under me, working that out would leave me gasping for air.  When it grew cold that winter, the room was shut off to conserve heat.  The fluorescent tube even burned out, so the plants had no light or heat.  The jade plant died.  The spider plant survived.

  
  

  When I got well (or better, anyway) I propagated it.  Those babies have grown up and put forth more runners with babies swinging from them.  At one time I had six big spider plants hanging in the east- and south-facing windows of our big front room here.  It began to strike me as absurd, all that flourishing greenery all of one species, so I moved a few outside in summer and let the frost kill them later.  I added two marantas (prayer plants), a green one and a red-veined variety, sharing a single hanging basket.  I also got a chlorophytum (wandering jew or creeping charlie) and a Whiskey begonia. 

  
  

  All but the begonia are thriving now, and it’s hanging in there.  If it makes it through winter, it will bush out and bloom as soon as the days grow long again.  I will do what I can to ensure that it survives.  Those plants are the main reason I make such an effort to keep the temp up in here, and practically the only reason that in winter at least one of us stays home all the time to keep the fire going. 

  
  

  Everything else that lives here is either mammalian and produces its own heat, or insectoid or arachnoid and hibernating now–rodents are mammals, aren’t they?  Occasionally the cats catch one that has come in from the cold.  If things freeze up in here, the only thing that won’t survive is the greenery.  I value them.  They not only brighten the place up and make it feel like the tropics (just kidding, I hate the tropics, all that heat, humidity and pollen) but they are humidifiers.  We need a little humidity when it is this cold.

  
  

  Well, Doug has just gotten out of Couch Potato Heaven to take the daily jug of hot water across the road to the colony of feral cats over there, so I’m off to Disgaea on the PS2.  BTW, yesterday when he was over there, there were two moose in the yard.  Seeya later.

  • 4:43 pm
  • 5 Comments