Friday, January 20, 2012

Flower Children

It's that time of the year when seed catalogs start arriving and people, plunged into winter's darkness, snow and cold, show their invincible summer spirits and green thumbs.  Those seed catalogs seem to arrive at just the right time when winter is wearing us down.  More and more people have been talking about plants with me lately.  Laura, my colleague from the office next door, joyfully showed me the dark red amaryllis growing in her window, its thick stem and four large, trumpet-shaped blossoms sprouting rapidly over the past days.  Our neighbor Marilyn is Christmas cactus-sitting while good friends are away. She carefully tends to the beautiful plant that bore its fuchsia blossoms around Thanksgiving.  My friend Sara is also caring for a plant for a friend while tending to her own. She admitted that she doesn't like watering plants but knows that their presence in her home feeds her soul and cleans the air.  Sara told me that she has geraniums that she has lovingly tended since 1988 when her oldest grandson was born.  I go through phases of having lots of plants and then hardly any.  In recent years, I've grown quite lazy and have fallen in love with succulents.  Thanks to my friend Debbie, I have a basket of succulents that is bringing green cheer into our winter white world.  My latest experiment: I'm attempting to winter over two outdoor pots of succulents in our garage.  We'll see if it worked when spring rolls around.  Till then, we'll dog-ear the seed catalog pages, tend to our indoor plants and dream of spring when Mother Nature calls us back outdoors to dig our hands once again into the good earth.

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