Years ago I was living in a situation where I had no place for my four biggest plants: Jolly Bob, the Professor, Dr. Cheung, and Greg. They all went to live in Rich's wonderful solarium with the floor-to-ceiling southern exposure windows, tall ceiling, and skylight, and he pushed them against the wall so they all got lazy and, instead of standing up straight, needed something to lean against. In our current condo we have a whole room for the plants, so the Professor and Dr. Cheung are in there, and Jolly Bob is up in the loft, where it has gotten so large that we may never be able to get it back down. Rich seemed more fond of Greg and wanted to keep it at his house for a while, but eventually he asked me to take Greg back too, so it went into the plant room.
You may be wondering where these plants got these names. I found Jolly Bob on the sidewalk as Tiffy and I were returning from a now-defunct Jamaican restaurant called Jolly Bob's. The Professor was left to me by someone who was more than an acquaintance but not exactly a friend who had gotten a Ph.D. and was leaving town. A former coworker was getting rid of Dr. Cheung, so I offered to take it, and then everyone said, "Oh, that's Dr. Cheung's plant," but whoever Dr. Cheung was, they had left before I had started. And Greg was abandoned by a neighbor named Greg, so I took it in. They were all big enough plants at the time, but now they are huge, and Greg was getting so tall that it barely fits in the plant room anymore. We might have to put it in the living room, which has a much higher ceiling.
Since I take in abandoned plants, I got one somewhere along the way that spread these fuzzy white bugs all around my plant room. The monocots seem much more prone to them, so they were all over the dracaenas and the ponytail palm my Archirritant left with me when she moved to Florida. Last summer I put them outside, and ladybugs ate the fuzzy white bugs, plus the plants just loved the fresh air. So this year I've moved out the two dracaena marginatas someone abandoned at my old condo complex, and a corn plant dracaena that came back from the dead so I call it Lazarus, and a small corn plant dracaena that doesn't have the bugs but that someone abandoned at work and it wasn't doing well, the ti plant I got from Travalon's mom's funeral that isn't doing well, the ponytail palm, and Greg. Now Greg is a very tall corn plant dracaena, and it's unwieldy, so it fell over one direction. I set it back up, and then it fell over the other direction and decapitated one of the dracaena marginatas. I put a heavy pot that had a cordyline that had died but then come back and then hated being outside and died again on one side of Greg, so it won't fall on the other plants. If it falls the other way, it could take out my very happy black calla lily, the gardenia that bloomed all spring, and a fuchsia that isn't doing so well. I need to bring down a heavy pot with some struggling dieffenbachias in it to put on the other side, and then maybe Greg will stay put... and maybe the dieffenbachias will recover. Being outside seems to do wonders for struggling plants... except weirdly that cordyline. Who knows? Maybe it will come back again.
Famous Hat
No comments:
Post a Comment