In my apartment in Oakland, there's no room for a garden, but I do have some plants out on the fire escape. The largest is a rose, a delicate pink, strongly scented, fluffy-petaled English rose, Sharifa Asma. The past two springs, when it has sent out shoots all over, I have knocked off a lot of them in an effort to channel its growth into a fuller shrub. This spring I just let it go. It has filled out nicely with fresh, red-green leaves, maybe even on the "frame" I built in previous years, and has young flower buds all over. The northern side is a little mildewy, but I'm ignoring that for now.
Nearby is a cactus that I have had for a few years. It, too, is blooming, now for the first time. I had wondered what the development of a fuzzy white patch on top meant, and now there are two bright pink buds poking up out of it.
I have admired the Masdevallias at the San Francisco Orchid Society show for many years, but my previous attempts to grow them resulted in the premature deaths of two plants. Anticipating my arrival on the first floor (chilly, not much light) of a North Beach flat, I bought another at this year's show in February, and put it on a ledge outside the bedroom window. When I checked up on it last weekend, I found that it has apparently been loving this cold, rainy weather. Its new leaves have grown well, and it's sending up what appear to be two flower shoots. This is quite exciting because it wasn't blooming when I bought it, and there was no photo of the flower. I bought it because it looked like such a happy, robust plant, and because I was told that both of its parents - it's a hybrid - had bright, large flowers.
I'm not sure what to make of how happy this all makes me. Saturday morning, I had been quite grouchy because I had woken up earlier than I would have liked. But when I checked the masdevallia and saw the two flower shoots, I became quite cheerful, because of something that has no "real" effect on me.
4 comments:
p- It's that nature/culture symbiosis, ya know?! :) (I wouldn't say that nature has "nothing" to do with you...we're a part of it right.)
Incidentally, I attribute the vigor of the baby masdevallia to its hybridity!
c67
Congrats on the masdevallia! My phalaenopsis, which has been dormant and close to death's door for about half of the 8 years that I've had it, has recently sprouted a new stalk with new purple buds. This makes me impossibly happy, and like your experience with your plant, I'd say this feeling is no less "real" than the measurable locomotion of molecules or the transcendent spiritual reality of Zen or the Tao. We live among things, we take joy from things, and these joys and emotions are all a part of getting closer to understanding and really experiencing the whole. Like it says somewhere in the early part of the Chuang Tzu, "Most people breathe from their throats, but someone who's 'gotten there' breathes from his heels." An endorsement for free, unfettered feeling if I ever heard one.
(Pahoehoe, that last comment was from me, pwl)
PWL,
Congratulations on your Phalaeanopsis! I've never owned any, and it's probably just as well because I haven't been able to figure out what makes them tick from my observations of friends' plants. Some seem to thrive and some die in what appear to me to be very similar conditions.
I meant "real" in the sense of providing some quantifiable advantage to me. I agree that this happiness is part of our striving to understand our connection to "the whole". What about breathing from the stomata? :)
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