Day 6: Let's Get Some PLANTS Up in Here!

 Sunday October 29 dawned gray and pouring, but still warm. Shila couldn't wait to see the new space any longer. I couldn't WAIT to show it to her. It was so wonderful to experience her reaction to finally being able to walk into the greenhouse!   Plus, it's the closest I can get you to walking into it yourself. I think you can see why she's such a wonderful friend. My joy is her joy, and it goes the other way, too.   

                                               

One thing she can be depended upon to do is to flip out with exactly the right amount of enthusiasm and joy (turned up to 11) that the situation warrants. I love her for that!

Shila also came because she knew I was in a real crunch. She wanted to help me get the two big Creole Lady hibiscus down out of the tower room before it got too cold to take them outside and hose them down. A week ago, I arrived at her house with pots and clippers and together we repotted her entire plant collection. It was EPIC. We are one hell of a team.

That cold weather was the real time pressure I was facing. The poor plants were absolutely felted in aphids and I was determined to get them clean and free of bugs before installing them in the new space. Man, it was SO much easier bringing them downstairs than up had been (not surprisingly; gravity was working with us), but it was also a breeze to do it together. I do everything by myself, and so does Shila, but two people can do so much more than one.

It was a hibiscus douche to remember. I sprayed the crap out of those trees. oooh look at that space, framed by crimson maple leaves...nice shot Sheels!

Photos by Shila Wilson

I'm smiling because since I wrote this, I've already taken the hibs out for another spray and douche. It's no biggie to roll them out the door and have at it with the hose. In the little Groanhouse, I had to unload most of the plants just to get one hibiscus out. This is wonderful! I expect to have many fewer aphids and much less spraying this winter than ever before. 

Had to take a selfie once we got some plants inside. 

After Shila left, I kept bringing plants downstairs, from all over the house. I still didn't have any heat in there, but it was still warm, and I was relying on Walter to show up that afternoon.  I was just beginning to wonder where Walter might be when he and Colton showed up around 1 pm to lay the gas line and install the heater. Thank goodness!  He'd spent the morning getting all the stuff he'd need. I was so, so grateful. Shopping for pipe and fittings is second nature to him. Enemy territory for me. He simply knew what diameter pipe each piece was, and he brought the right stuff  to do the job. 

I was madly moving plants in even as they were working on installing the pipe and stove. 

I simply couldn't wait any longer to get plants in there!

I couldn't believe how many plants I had, stuffed in every window in the house, and how beautiful they all were. I had had to bring them in weeks ago when it went down to the upper 30's. Most had whiled away the time in the tower room, which gets great sun, although it gets very hot up there on warm days. Obviously they hadn't suffered much! But really, the house was just loaded, every good window crowded with plants reaching for light. 

I was so thankful I'd have heat by evening, because the wind was picking up and it was starting to get chilly. The installation wasn't easy in the awful sticky  mud and rain, but by nightfall there was heat in the new greenhouse! Walter and Colton to the rescue!

Thank goodness for friends, friends you can call and hire in a pinch. 

Oh, but I wasn't home free yet. Not by a long shot. The heating fun was only beginning. 

There's always a Rest of the Story. 

A Hard-won Prize

 I’m not the first to observe that the best thing about plants is making more of them. I may have missed my calling. I could so easily have been a greenhouse rat, a professional plant maven. A tastemaker, a horticultural influencer. I can pretend, anyway. I grow a lot of things, and I pass them on to family and friends like a joyful gnome tossing gold coins from a treasure chest. “Here. You’ve GOT to have this plant. This is the greatest plant. It doesn’t look like much now, but come the end of July, it’s going to send out some hot pink flowers that will drive you mad with joy.”

Speaking of mad with joy...look at this beauty! 

 I have for years been enamored of a hibiscus named Creole Lady, which I ordered from Logee’s Greenhouse easily a decade ago. I’ve seen lots of nice hibiscus, and I love my glorious yellow and red "The Path," but this one, one of the Cajun hybrids, carries special voodoo magic. 

Early in the morning, her sails start to unfurl.  

Then, BAM!

In come the peachy sunset tones...it's hard to say what my favorite stage is, but this one, ohh.

 Just before closing, it goes all pale yellow and silver. Amazing. 

My decade-plus love affair with this plant has deepend into a mature "I don't want to live without you" love.

 I like its growth habit, its leaves (dark green and shiny) and its enormous flowers, six inches across, with that bewitching color-changing habit. This is the same flower, at the beginning and the end of a summer day. The progression happens faster when it's hot. 

 By the time the yellow and silver flower falls, a new bud is opening with those heady sunrise tones, and you get to do the whole swoony thing all over again. It’s a drama queen and I love it with all my heart.

 

I’ve taken many cuttings of Creole Lady over the years, and every single one of them has turned black and died. My impetus to propagate this plant is several-pronged. First, it’s the best hibiscus I’ve ever seen. Second, it’s really hard to find—there is one grower in Florida currently offering it, but he’s usually back-ordered for six months or more. Third, I can’t keep an individual hibiscus for more than five or six years, because they get too big. Like, scraping the greenhouse ceiling big. Tree big. Redwood big. 

 Fourth, my greenhouse is prone to midwinter freezes, when the gas cuts off and everything dies. I have been burned so many times that I’ve learned to keep a small Creole Lady on hand as insurance, one that I can keep in the house during cold snaps, just in case the greenhouse freezes one single-digit night (which is always when it happens). To go from a glorious tree full of coral and violet blossoms to a sad rack of limp rags is Very Hard on the Heart. But it has happened to her, and to me, several times. Such is the gas supply from our well: erratic and faulty.

 This is why I need an understudy coming along all the time. I’m completely neurotic about it, moreso with time, because Creole Lady is getting harder and harder to obtain. When Logee’s stopped carrying it, I ordered one from Winn’s Exotic Hibiscus one January, and finally received a small, spindly plant at the end of June. I had prepaid, but had to remind him that I still wanted it, and then it finally shipped. With endless love and attention, that spindly plant—grafted onto a stronger rootstock, I might add, because it’s so hard to root—is a magnificent three-year-old. And I’m already foreseeing the time when it gets too big to handle, and I will have to replace it with one whose pot I can lift.

 

You see, there has been a rolling succession of Creole Ladies in my life. What happens with hibiscus in my greenhouse, if they don't die by freezing, is that they all eventually outgrow their welcome. Last January, I finally gave up on the enormous five-year-old Lady who had been frozen down to bare sticks in a gas outage,

 slowly came back into full glory, got huge, 

then became infested last winter with small green aphids that I absolutely could not get rid of. I was spraying that plant twice a day and still it was a living green mat of aphids, infesting everything else in my tiny greenhouse. It was no longer an asset. Attached as I was, I had to get rid of it. But before I dragged her enormous pot out into the snow and kissed her goodbye, I took three small cuttings. It was January 21, 2021.

 Hastening to add that I had an understudy from Winn! or I'd never have euthanized the giant plant.

I washed the cuttings, dipped them in rooting hormone, and put them in clean wet vermiculite in a clean plastic cup. I made a humidity tent with a second clear plastic cup. I provided gentle heat from below with a five watt aquarium heater meant for bettas. The cuttings sat there for weeks, bathed in full-spectrum light from a grow lamp, doing absolutely nothing. Two turned black and died. One stayed green. But it was April 30—three full months—before a tiny white root protruded from its base. You can see the other cutting is black and rotty and dying. That's par for the course. 

 By June—five months later—the lone living one had five roots perhaps a half-inch long. I tried a couple of times to remove the top cup, to get it used to ambient humidity, and each time the leaves wilted like a damp Kleenex, giving me clear indication that it intended to die, and die soon. Back on with the humidity cup. The cutting sulked. The summer got hot and I removed the bottom heater. Still the cutting sat, doing nothing. One day in early July I was alarmed to see two of its leaves turning yellow. They fell off. The stem started turning black. Oh no!! I was desperate. Clearly what I was doing wasn’t working. Time to change things up. 

 

I removed all but one leaf, reasoning that it would lose less water through one leaf than four. I repotted it and its puny roots in real potting soil, and then I put it outside in light shade on my chipmunk-proof propagation table. It would no longer have a humidity chamber. This plant was on its own. It was now or never. And that cutting started putting out green shoots and then it made new leaves. By golly it was alive!! It was growing! I had my tiny understudy!  It had been agonizingly slow, but somehow I’d blundered through and done it.  (Three year old Creole Lady in back).

 

Now all I want to do is try again. That was fun. And I am a true masochist. 

But with good reason. LOOK AT THIS PLANT.

Need Joy? Come on Over!

Not that anyone needs color and light and joy right now...I thought I'd offer up a little virtual stroll through the greenhouse, just to stick our noses into a few flowers. This is what greets me when I open the greenhouse door. Needless to say I find excuses to go down there about five times a day. Hooked on it. It was a rough winter, all rain and no sun, but now that the plants are getting some sun and heat, they're exploding into blossom. 

I find this interesting. When my big hibs froze on Jan. 30, 2019 (heating failure due to frozen gas line), there were a few tiny shoots around the base of The Path's trunk that didn't die back. They have grown a little and are blooming like crazy now. I don't know if it's because they're so close to the fertilizer, but they are much the best blossoms this plant has put out. It's dopey looking but I LOVE IT.

Creole Lady is still bewitching, but she's decided to lay back to let The Path, with her dress around her ankles, take center stage. She'll kick it up a few notches when she finally gets outside in May. 

And there's a Lady in Waiting. Look at this tiny baby Creole Lady that I got in the summer of 2019! She's finally coming into her own. More flower than leaf...

Two blossoms at once is very unusual for a little cutting like this. But so gratifying. My huge Lady slumbers behind her. I absolutely love having an understudy that's small enough to carry into the house should the need arise. Like, drastically plunging temperatures, foretelling another disastrous greenhouse freeze.

This plant...I live for its blossoms.

The Thai Giant crown of thorns is just ridiculous, 3' tall and loaded with peppermint-striped flowers.

Started from a 2" long cutting taken in 2016. I have tried to take cuttings of this one but none have rooted for me. Sometimes it just works. Sometimes it doesn't. 

This little Gartenmeister was a tiny shoot that sulked all winter long, then sprang to life when it got sunny. I like to carry this plant over because I'm never sure if I'll be able to find it in the spring. 

Same for Trandshen Bonstet. That one, far as I know, you can't get anywhere but The Glasshouse Works in Stuart, Ohio. Mine is 4' tall now! Roots really well in plain water!

A volunteer impatiens peeking out from under the foliage of my willow-leaved fig. This is the magnificent tropical bonsai that froze last year, and has somehow come back. It looks like a hairy sea urchin right now, but I have faith it will make some decent branches in time.

The geraniums are just spectacular now.

Black Knight is a volcano of the darkest possible foliage and gleaming coals. 

Can't wait for Happy Thought to open its scarlet tanager-red single flowers.

Due to its interesting start in life, this Happy Thought plant has a ridiculous number of individual trunks. 

Both Happy Thought and Vancouver Centennial (shown below) have a really interesting habit of making baby plants amongst their flower heads, way up there on the end of a long stem. It's so weird. I have observed this for years and always wondered what's going on with it. Two years ago I started experimenting with trying to propagate more plants from these funny little leaf clusters. Vancouver's plantlets always got mildew and rotted away in my rooting chambers (just a clear plastic cup inverted over a pot of damp soil).  But two years ago I managed to root a tiny leaf cluster of Happy Thought, and that's the plant in the photo above. It grew painfully slowly, but it grew, and it's a fine, fine plant now.

Of course, I will keep trying because plant propagation is one of my vices.

Greenhouse Apocalypse III

I was in town with Bill from dawn to 3 pm on January 31. It was famously cold, two below zero, and Jupiter, the crescent moon, and Venus were in perfect alignment in the southeast sky when I awoke. Color bled up from the horizon, tangerine into peacock into midnight blue, slowly fading to salmon to lilac to turquoise as the light came up. It was so beautiful I kept imploring Bill to look, but he was too sick to enjoy it. We were on our way to a full day’s chemo, and he wasn’t looking forward to it one bit.

We are watching him disappear, watching his body and his energy, his Bill-ness ebbing away, and it’s happening so fast we can’t even believe it from one day to the next. There’s nothing his doctor can do about it, either, but to keep slamming him with biweekly baths of poison to try to kill the cancer before it kills him. He’s lost fifty pounds. His pants fall off him now, but he doesn’t want to buy new ones. “Just more stuff to give to Goodwill,” he says. He doesn’t have any more belt holes to tighten.

I try to make him comfortable, but I can’t. I try to give him foods he’ll enjoy. I try to engage him in conversation, to redirect his thoughts to something other than his sorrow and dissolution and disillusionment, to all the things he has to give up, and all the things he believes he won’t get to experience. Which is everything. Everything. It is difficult. He is difficult. He doesn’t want to do any of this. He wants things the way they were. So do I, so do I, my love. I wish for a magic wand. I wish for anything good, however small. I scratch and search but everything I offer seems so meaningless. I’m not doing enough. Nobody can.

When his treatment was finally over, I brought him gently home, helped him get back into his pajamas and tucked him into bed for a nap at the pink house. I came back to the red house and when I stepped into the foyer it felt awfully cold. I checked the thermostat. It said 57. The vents were ice cold. I ran out the front door and around the side of the house and as I neared the greenhouse, I could see wilted geranium flowers, red as old blood, plastered up against the wall. Opened the door, and was hit in the face with the stink of dying green. It was 22 inside. Everything was dead. I gathered up an armload of small succulents that hadn’t yet wilted limp and brought them in the house, figuring they were just going to take longer to die than the thin-leaved ones, but maybe they were somehow still living.

 

Creole Lady, her leaves hanging limp as washcloths, standing 8’ tall, and  dead. The Path, her glorious golden red flower, blasted and dead, buds hanging straight down, her leaves dark bronze. This is my third such greenhouse freeze. I know this stench, I know this grief, I know the irreversibility of it all, and how it feels to lose beautiful things you’ve loved for years, without a whisper of warning.

  

  

I didn’t wail, didn’t weep. I just closed the door and went back into the house to try to figure out what to do. If the gas line was frozen at the wellhead, I was screwed, screwed, screwed. And, with the temperatures below zero, and the welljack jammed and inoperative for at least 2 ½ years, that was a highly likely scenario. It hadn’t pumped for two winters. The oil company doesn’t give a rat’s ass, either. They have all but abandoned this and many other shallow wells in the area, operating them on a skeleton crew. Who cares if people’s houses go cold? One by one, the welljacks jam up and quit pumping, and none of them get fixed. I’ve been told the natural pressure at the wellhead would keep me in gas. OK. I'd go through a second winter like this. But if it wasn’t frozen at the wellhead, if there was just some condensation in the line, brought out by the deep cold, then sudden bright sun, I could trip the regulator and have gas again. Too late for my greenhouse plants, but at least the ones in the house wouldn’t have to die, too. I wouldn’t lose the aquarium, the orchids, the pipes to this cruel freeze.

 I called my neighbor, Bob Harris. He told me to call the guy who tends the well. Jeff’s wife, who answered, was very sympathetic. She said he’d call me back, and he did. Oh yeah, he said, he’d seen the wellhead pressure fall to zero on my well around noon. (Oh, good. Thanks.) He told me to trip the regulator by the back door and I should get my gas back. While I was gathering tools to do that, Bob drove up in his white truck, honking. I thawed the frozen regulator cap with a Ziploc bag full of hot water, then unscrewed it. The regulator tripped with a hiss, and we were in business again. Bob and I re-lit the pilots on the big furnace, the water heater, and the small furnace. We re-lit the greenhouse heater. We made sure everything was working. I popped him a beer and we sat at the kitchen table and talked. I asked him about all the neighbors, and I told him some things he didn’t know about some of them. He told me more about Gary, who ate pileated woodpeckers and pretty much all the squirrels for miles around. About what it looked like inside that white farmhouse the day Gary died, the bottles and cans in piles.

I wondered why we’d never done this, sat down at the kitchen table and talked. It was because in 25 years, I’d never asked him for help. I’d asked him not to mow his milkweed, and he’d been happy to help with that.  He’d been so nice about it, too. Now I needed real help. I have no one now who can take over when I’m too rattled to think straight. No one to lean on, no one in charge but me. So I call my neighbor, and he comes over and helps me, and he says he will do that any time. That’s good, that’s money in the bank. And Lord knows if there was anything I could do for him and Debbie and Sam, I’d be there. Imagine, feeling community after 25 years. It takes awhile when you think you have it all figured out, when you think you've got this. And then you realize you don’t, and you are unequivocally alone, and nothing about that is going to change. You pick up the phone and call, and he’s there ten minutes later, in your driveway. What a feeling.

I called Phoebe and told her everything in the greenhouse was dead. She said she remembered the first time it happened when she was quite young, coming in and seeing me in a fetal position on the bedroom floor, crying and crying. And she thought, “Well, she still has me and Liam.” I felt a rush of shame, that I’d let her see me cry over some flowers. That she’d had to have that thought. That it seemed to her that flowers mattered more to me than she and her brother did. It sure looked that way to a child. If anything, this is a time for facing hard truths and bad behavior, for telling the truth to each other. 

That wailing woman was the old me, the one with the luxury of crying over dead geraniums. That was the one who hadn’t seen real loss yet. I cried a lot the second time, it froze too, in November 2013. But I cried for all that was happening around me, things I couldn't reconcile or control. I referred to it as Greenhouse Apocalypse, the plants a metaphor for a far greater loss.

I met this third freeze with a different face. For this event, I had nothing left but numb resolve. Face it, they’re all dead. Let’s see about getting some heat in the house, or I die, too. I told myself I didn’t care about a bunch of plants. They were just things, after all. I don’t have cancer. There’s that. And for awhile I didn’t feel anything. I made myself a nice dinner, knowing that would help. I wondered at my steely calm as I ate in the silence of the evening. It frightened me. Was my soul frozen, gone? It started to hurt about six hours later, after dark, about the time I'd usually go down to open the door and say, "Hello, Ladies!", to stand under the soft multi-colored twinkle lights and look at the lush flowers in half-darkness. I figured I'd better check in with someone, so I called Shila, left a message and she called me back. I told her what had happened today. And there was something about her shock and anguish that broke through the ice on my heart. “I am a little…sad about it,” I stammered, and my voice broke. Yeah. That's it. I’m a little sad.

My reactions, I realized with a sinking feeling, are those of a dog who has been kicked so many times it no longer thinks that’s anything unusual. It’s just what happens. With everything that’s happening to Bill, I’m abashed to feel sad about a bunch of plants. Just another kick. So what. I don’t want to go down that path, of weeping. There is too much far more worth weeping about. I haven't even been able to cry about him—there’s too much to do yet to try to help him. What good would crying do? I moved through the house like a robot, got ready for bed, slept two hours, and awoke to begin the grieving.

For Creole Lady, with the Hawaiian sunset in every blossom.

Same flower, before and after freeze. Ain't it grand.

 

 The Path, like a fire burning, lighting the way...to what? 

 

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What 21 degrees does to a tropical hibiscus. Same flower, below.  

 

That hybrid balcony geranium that just wouldn’t stop blooming for anything. The willow leaved fig, 8 years in bonsai training, almost a yard tall, magnificent with its great coil of roots, now black, dead.

  

That giant rosebud geranium smuggled as a cutting from Ecuador, just coming into bloom almost two years later, dead now. All the fuchsias, all the Happy Thought geraniums, my very favorites, all thinking about blooming. All dead. The day before, I had just shown my “woman cave” to Geoff and Paco and Ben, taken their picture posing with the two enormous hibiscus trees I loved so much. I remember telling them the trees were too big for me to move now, so I hoped it wouldn’t freeze up this winter. But I’d known all along that it would.

 

  

 

The gas line would freeze again this year. I'd lose everything, and I knew it. So in early December, I decided to make a plant ark. I went through the greenhouse, gathering up one specimen of each plant that I’d be heartbroken to lose: the pink fuchsia called "Trandshen Bonstedt;" the plectranthus "Cerveza ‘n’ Lime" from Donna; an impala lily seedling; the chartreuse-leaved geranium called "Happy Thought." One dwarf pomegranate seedling. The yellow kalanchoe that makes me happy. A begonia called Jurassic Watermelon. A painstakingly rooted cutting of the willow-leaved fig bonsai, only three inches tall. I took cuttings of geraniums Vancouver Centennial and Rosina Read, gathered them up and brought them into the house, to grow on the windowsills, where they wouldn’t die instantly when the gas went off. I made a genetic bank, taking just enough DNA to get me through when everything had to die. 

I even bought a heat mat and got an old fishtank and made great plans to take cuttings of Creole Lady and The Path. Bottom heat is the only way to root those, I'd decided, having failed at it for years. I was going to do it as soon as I could get some cuttings without flower buds. I’d wait, let them bloom first. I needed every flower so badly. And then on December 16 Bill was diagnosed, and later that week I carried the fishtank and the heat mat to the basement, because I suddenly no longer cared to try to start anything. It was more than I could do just to be present, to help.

But I kept my little ark of treasured plant starts in the main house, and I watered them faithfully, and they began to grow nicely. So I haven’t lost everything. I have the genetic material for some of my favorite plants, right here. I had taken out a little insurance. The big hibiscus I loved so much are dead. I can’t escape to the warm, softly lit greenhouse any more. I'm not putting anything back in there, no way. So what. I’m a little sad. But I don’t have cancer.

 Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation  can that which is indestructible in us be found. 

 Pema Chödron

 January 31, 2019