Houseplants Gone Wild

Or
You really CAN Go Home Again

This is Paradise: Florida - where escapees from past lives of pampered prissiness in the rarified atmosphere of, well, hothouse flowers - come to GO WILD! Welcome to Paradise! You’re HOME! Now get outside! No need to wipe your feet. Just plant ‘em.

Phil O Dendron. You’ve got the top bunk. Climb right on up into the tree canopy. Yo! Snake! (I’m from Joizey originally¼), Ms Dieffenbachia! There’s the shade. Stay put and be quiet! You fancy Orchids, you’ll be hanging around in that oak. No sweat. No greenhouse torpor. Relax. You’ve come to the right place. See you next week!

Coleus! Shade or sun? Your choice. Begonia! Impatience! Cool it. Iris, take the plunge in the pond. (You seem different, somehow!) Herb! Didn’t think you’d make it but there you are, feet in the sand, basking in the sun. If you don’t want to get down and dirty, you can pull up a pot. If you come on too strong, you’d best stay in that pot. I’ll water you more often, if you insist. It’s my pleasure, really.

Rose! WATCH OUT! There are spider plants creeping around your feet!

What I’m trying to say is that here in sunny southern ( middle, western) Florida, houseplants we spent fevered hours acclimatizing do quite well turned loose on the outside. No more: Which window? - What exposure does this need? - If I mist, will it bloom? Do you think this new curly hose thingy will stretch across the house? – Here is where genetic memories beckon from the goo of collective pasts. At last Flora has returned to her birthplace from the miles and millennia.

And Yes: Memory still exists. Impaired, fuzzy around the edges, ‘way the worse for wear and tear, but here it is. Pay no attention to those rotting floors and those mushrooms sprouting in that musty corner behind the plant tray! (It really happened!) I also had Swedish ivy rooted to the baseboard of my old Vista Cruiser, stowed away, while en route to a “plant party” years ago. It might have been that same party wherein I transported a lizard to this nice lady’s living room amongst the plants for sale, where it deplaned (DE Plane! DE Plane!) and set a room full of women screaming and scurrying for their lives. It started innocently enough with one dowager exclaiming: “There’s a FROG on the wall!!!!”

I had a dome greenhouse back then, accumulated from the ex’s pool business. This was the site of much passion. Not between aforementioned 23rd letter and your devoted memory-less auteur. (unless I just can’t remember, and then just how passionate could it have been?). Anyway: Aunt Alice was visiting and became the unfortunate voyeur to the tryst of a couple of snakes. (reptilian, not herbaceous or matrimonial ) (repeat the shriek: “There’s a FROG on the wall!!!”)

In that domed greenhouse, I nurtured a Passionvine. I don’t remember how it came into my possession: This was the ‘70s in New Jersey. But there it bloomed in all its kaleidoscopic wonder. That greenhouse was a major loss when x stopped marking the spot and the kids and I moved down here to Venice.

Another bittersweet memory lights the corner of my gardeny consciousness: My lovely compost pile. Formed like the mashed potato mountain in Close Encounters from said unconsciousness and topped, (no kidding) with a giant bocce ball sized, doo ball. I had accumulated my pile’s crowning glory after watching it drop right out of the wrong end of an elephant, when the circus came to town and the girls and I went Trick-or-Treating. (It wasn’t Halloween but I took plastic bags to beg some tiger bedding/deer repellant(?) and whatever circus stuff they’d give me to add to my garden. (The girls refused to get into the car with the very intense-smelling stuff). Anyway – the elephant’s contribution topped the compost pile, a steaming, eventually dried out cherry on top, direct from the elephant to me. I used to walk around that compost pile meditating. (Again, I blame the 70s, and the 60s for that matter...) It was the center of the garden. Heaven’s bull’s-eye. So. I’m walking and breathing deep when all of a sudden, there’s a very big (about the size of a half-dollar) flat stone of pink quartz crystal in my hand. (60s). But it really was there! And I owned it until we made the move down here. I have a picture of the pile. I’ll show it to you.! Look again at the beginning of this post! Look closely!

(But I digress. Kind of. We moved to Venice now over a decade ago. That same year Venice lost the circus. This was the circus’ winter home and the elephants used to take part in the home-town Christmas parades down Main Street. So I lost the elephant connection Big Time that first year.)

But the Passionvines bloom here all year long, each a three-dimensional miracle. There are passion fruits hanging on the vine, the pony tail palms and Sheffleras bloom and the skies are not cloudy all day. Bananas and papayas grow their flowers and fruits and join the rest of us happy fugitives, returned now to the primeval garden, living the good life. Running wild (or as wild as we wish at this late date...) Reminders are everywhere, that it just takes time and following your heart to begin living up to our birth right, our true potential. Memory doesn’t leave. It kind of just gets buried in the goo. But the Call of the Wild exists in us, waiting to say “Welcome Home”.