Save the plant... 12.02.09
I'VE often heard people say
that you should talk to your plants and apparently it
will help them grow healthy and vibrant. If you are one
of those people who like to enter contests to see who
has the biggest whatever, it might even make them the
envy of your competitors.
I never paid much attention to suggestions that I should
talk to plants as a rule, but that’s not to say that I
have never done it. Take for instance the time last
summer when I was cutting the grass in the back garden
and, even though I had thought I had skillfully managed
to work my way around it, a branch from an apple tree
somehow managed to scrape the side of my face, just
missing my eye.
I’m pretty certain I spoke to that tree, though I’m also
quite sure what I said to it would not be the kind of
thing you’d publish in the paper.
Mostly though the only words I seem to say on a regular
basis to plants are |
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‘sorry about that,’ and
they usually come as the plant in question has died a
painful and excruciating death of severe thirst and I’m
throwing it in the bin.
I’m just glad that plant murder is not a crime. I could
just imagine yer man Grissom out of CSI swarming all
around my house quoting philosophers and stuff and
shaking his head at the dead stalks and wilting leaves.
No doubt about it, I’d be a gonner.
I think I might even have come to the conclusion that
houses are not the correct place for plants to grow in,
were it not for the fact that it’s my admiration for
plants and their hardiness and determination that has
kept me going back for more, even after I’ve committed
serial murder on them.
Because by and large the plants in my garden survive
pretty well and I somehow have managed to have built up
a relationship with them whereby they don’t die every
few months, I had begun to wonder about the sense of
keeping plants indoors.
And then I realised. Were it not largely for the fact
that my outdoor plants have the wonderful world of
nature to keep them watered, I might be facing the same
problem with them.
I have also realised that, as far as house-plants are
concerned, it is not a good idea to think you can forget
to water them until say, June, and try to make up by
pouring gallons of water on them.
Once you see the soil and all floating from the flower
pot you can take it pretty much for granted that this
plant has passed on to the big plant heaven in the sky.
I’m sure at this point there are so many plants in that
plant heaven as a result of my forgetfulness with the
watering can, that if God turns out to be a plant I can
pretty much kiss my hopes of eternal salvation goodbye.
But you know, all that said I would suggest that in
recent times I have been getting better and my love of
nature means that I will keep on trying.
You see I admire plants and how they can grow in places
like cracks in the footpath and how they can find all
sorts of wee nooks and crannies with a teeny bit of soil
and just grow and then stretch towards the light. It’s
nearly like they’re alive…
I know, I know, most people call these plants weeds, but
hey there are times when you have still just got to stop
and admire their bloody tenacity.
Or perhaps you don’t. Some people I know would like to
put concrete down in as many places as they could and if
they needed flowers, well they could always use those
plastic thingys.
Ahem folks, notwithstanding their downright tardiness in
comparison to the real thing, what about things like
photosynthesis. |
Come on now, real plants
keep on working away keeping us alive with clean air and
stuff even if we forget to water them.
And if you were to follow that example anyway next thing
you’d know we’d be doing away with real animals because
they are so needy and all and replacing them with
stuffed ones.
Nope, no doubt about it I think I’m going to have to
make a bigger effort to keep my plants alive.
That said I’d better be off to see what they’d like for
breakfast…one glass of water or two? |
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A DROP OF
PORTER is
the weekly
column of
Inishowen
Independent
editor,
Liam Porter. |
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