I like to feel that I’m rescuing them, but maybe it’s the other way around
There’s a greenhouse at the back of my local garden centre where they keep the big houseplants and each one is carefully labelled: “Plant”. I buy one at a time to avoid ongoing domestic dispute and they collect greenly in my house under varying levels of care. Varying levels of care, but infinite love, love I learned from my parents’ relationship with a plant that lives at the top of their stairs which they call the “moon flower”. I’ve identified it online as a night-blooming cereus – further, an Epiphyllum oxypetalum, and my sister and I receive texts alerting us to news of an opening bud. My parents will have woken to a smell, sickly but good, like someone’s caramelising a memory, and they will tell us to be round at dusk. Because then we can stand on the stairs and watch it open, actually watch the petals creak open, until it is there basking in the moonlight, that smell now quite raw and conquering. By morning the flower will have died, and hang from a leaf like a washed up squid.
When I moved house, my dad gave me a cutting, which now stands dwarfed by a giant version I found in the garden centre bin. But much as I love the garden centre with its jolly disregard for potted things, my preferred way to acquire new plants is via adoption. It’s a similar feeling I get on my weekly tour of the local charity shops – the cancer one is good for books, the hospice one is better for furniture, and the one raising funds for sick children is excellent for pottery.
Continue reading...from Property | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2G4UsRt
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