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| My Favorite Coleus |
Peggy's bedroom has green walls and no plants. My bedroom has pink walls and up to forty-four plants. It is my favorite place on earth, and my GQ handsome Ollie must agree because when I call him to bed each night, I can hear him galloping from three rooms away.
My last bedroom addition was a Gulf Stream Nandina that I named Tommy in honor of my father, and which I moved indoors last fall. It was Tommy's fourth move since he entered my life in 2016. The first was from the nursery to my yard. When that didn't work out, I put him in a pot and switched him seasonally from deck to patio. Still he struggled. Then one night while Ollie and I were cuddling, I longed to have Tommy beside me, so I vainly searched the indexes of fifteen houseplant books for advice. Mystified but undeterred, Ollie and I welcomed Tommy into our bedroom two days later. His health improved so fast and so dramatically that I've since concluded that, like Ollie, Tommy would have galloped to join me if only he could.
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| Ollie Used to Make it Hard for Peggy to Get Off the Pot |
9 comments:
Your bedroom sounds like a haven and a sanctuary. For all its denizens.
When we lived in New York City, way back when, we had a long lineup of houseplants all along the windows and also a little forest on our 6 x 8 terrace. Being in the city, we felt a hunger for the greenery. Now we live in the suburbs with grass and bushes and trees, and so the need seems less, esp. since we keep the windows open from May thru Oct. (I hate a/c.) But I still have one lowly philodendron that I've carried with me all these years. My favorite plant.
That is a beautiful post Snow. To think your bedroom is pink and full of plants evokes smiling here from me. I have had similar instances with my cats as pictured!
I love walking around a nursery looking at all the plants
I want to take them all home lol
We just planted out more plants in the back yard
And a few weeks ago we planted lots of trees
Yes plants, are like furry friends. There is always room for one more lol
I have two huge hibiscus inside that will go outside once it is warm. I am battling aphids, evil little things. I have my orchids but they are struggling. We have lots of windows and light. My big bathtub is surrounded by plants that are waiting to go outside.
Ollie is adorable! My daughter's dog, Lucy, gallops through the house to sleep on my bed when the two of them visit. It's nice to be chosen :)
I'm glad you finally found the right spot for your plant.
"I still have one lowly philodendron that I've carried with me all these years."
What kind of philodendron is it--I assume that it's not a climbing one?
"I have had similar instances with my cats as pictured!"
Only Ollie nestled in Peggy's underwear, and we have another cat, Sage, who only likes to ride on Peggy's shoulders when she gets out of bed each morning. In trying to understand why our cats treat Peggy and me differently, I often wonder about the extent to which their behavior is related to our gender. I also wonder about how our treatment of them is related to our gender. I've observed that Peggy is more long-suffering in regard to things like trying to steal food off our plates while we're in the process of eating it, yet I am generally more indulgent than she. One of the things that cats have forced me to reflect upon is whether some of the things that I don't want them to do are really important enough to me that I'm willing to go to the wall to stop them from doing it. For example, how important is it to us that they not get onto a certain chair or table. In the case of the kitchen countertops, it's very important, but last winter, one of our cats decided that he really wanted to spend a couple of hours a day simply sitting on the bathroom countertop. I finally decided that, since he wasn't hurting anything, and wasn't in any danger (as he would be had he decided to sit on our electric stovetop), keeping him off of it simply wasn't worth the angst to us and to him. As sometimes happens, Peggy felt otherwise, but without me to help in the struggle, she finally abandoned the effort.
cont.
So it is that cats have forced me to understand that what they're asking to do--demanding, really--is in some cases reasonable, and that unless I want to admit to being a power-mad asshole who never backs down from a pointless demand, it behooves me to abandon the effort. This wasn't something that I had to consider during my decades with dogs. Interestingly, when something is really, really important to us, our cats will eventually honor our wishes. For instance, it is now a rare day when we hear cat feet hitting the floor after an excursion across the kitchen countertops.
But back to Ollie, he did a lot more cute things too, but, as is the way with cats, he abandoned them as he moved into adulthood. If I had a staff of helpers to empty litter boxes and so forth. I can easily imagine getting a new kitten every year or so. There was a long ago French cardinal named Richelieu who so liked kittens that he supposedly got rid of his mature cats, although what he did with them is unknown.
"Yes plants, are like furry friends. There is always room for one more lo"
So help us god, we're standing firm at five cats, and I know I will never have as many plants as I once did, the reason being that it became a real chore carrying them to the bathroom every two weeks for a shower. After years of reading about cats, I have returned to reading about plants, and adding a few new ones. Because of the virus, buying plants is a problem though. I can, of course, mitigate the risk by sticking to outdoor nurseries, and I'm also looking into ordering online, a major advantage being that I have a far greater variety to choose from. Right now, I have my eye set on a Callisa, and there's a particular Aglaonema that I've been lusting after for years.
"My big bathtub is surrounded by plants that are waiting to go outside."
I know it's supposed to be good for houseplants to enjoy the outdoors in summer, but I miss them, and then there's the risk of insects and slugs.
"Lucy, gallops through the house to sleep on my bed when the two of them visit. It's nice to be chosen :)"
It is, and I am definitely more pleasing to pets than to people. Still, I try not to make too much of it because if I do, and the pet's behavior changes, I'll feel like I somehow failed, and my feelings will be hurt. Also, I know that being chosen doesn't mean that my pet has some special insight into what a quality person I am, it simply means that I give him or her something they enjoy, and that what he or she finds enjoyable is subject to change.
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