Geeking out on plants

When we last left our hero, she had decided to go to a nursery to buy a snake plant.

The nursery I found online, and then ran out the door to get to in time, is Cactus Jungle.  How perfect!  I spent a long time there examining the gazillion plants they have that they claim I couldn't kill.  Some really pretty things.

And now I am a plant geek.  Well, just succulents.  I bought a gorgeous jade plant, which at $40 cost twice as much as the most expensive plant I've ever bought.  Then I started impulse buying, suddenly desiring more beautiful greenery in my life.

Echeveria setosa, Aeonium gomerense, and (in back) Crassula ovata.
They are even happier today than they are in this picture.

It wasn't just a shopping spree.  This place takes plants so seriously that they call the plants by their Latin names, so now I get to learn and recite these beautiful words.  I know it's a jade plant, and that's its nickname.  It's actually a Crassula ovata.  For outside my door, I bought a small Echeveria setosa and an Aeonium gomerense. (Note that Aeonium has all the vowels, awesome.)

As I picked out which Echeveria and Crassula I wanted, I asked the woman working there, "Is this a good one?" and she would say, "That's a beautiful specimen."  So not only do I have great plants, I have beautiful specimens.

Realizing I could use an office plant, I ran back in at the last minute and said, "I need a plant that can sit on a cold office windowsill that gets very indirect sunlight."  She handed me a teeny tiny pot with one of the weirdest plants I've ever seen, a string of pearls plant (another "beautiful specimen).  I actually don't know the Latin name.  It looks like the inside of a peapod, a string of peas, but it's very hardy.  You can't pull the peas/pearls off.  Like the other plants I bought, it doesn't need any attention.

Ironically, now that I've bought plants that need no attention, the geeking out comes, not only with my rolling their names around in my mouth, but with my daily checking and inspection of them to make sure they are happy.  I carefully monitor and remove dead leaves and celebrate the arrival of new ones.  I didn't want the Echeveria and Aeonium to be too cold, so I brought them in to bake in the warmth of my western window.  Yesterday, I discovered some bites taken out of the Echeveria, which luckily is not poisonous to cats, so now that poor plant is exiled to outside again until it heals.

Today I noticed that the Crassula ovata has some black spots under the leaves.  The old me would (1) not have noticed, and, if I did, (2) ignored it until the plant died.  The new succulent geek-me googled this and found that my plant may have a virus.  Since Cactus Jungle says I can bring in plants that may be ill for a consultation, that's my plan for tomorrow.

I will likely leave there with another plant, and a new Latin name, to add to my menagerie.

I tried, really I did.

A while back I brought my first plant into my home.  A kentia palm.  When that died, about a year ago, I went back to OSH and bought another palm, this time a majesty palm.  That has died as well.

The first died from underwatering; the second got mold from overwatering (I was told to drench the soil, not dump the occasional leftover glass of water in it), so I stopped watering it to kill the mold.

This time, before returning it to OSH, I did some research on "plants you can't kill."  What did we do before google?  I immediately found the magic list.  I was in particular looking for something that I didn't have to water at all, since I'm really good at that.

I cross-referenced that list with the list of plants that are poisonous to cats (which crosses off philodendron pretty quickly, but that's OK because they are vines and need to be put somewhere other than the floor) and came up with Snake Plant and its, well, relation, Mother-in-Law's Tongue. Both of these ominous-sounding plants are from the genus Sanseviera, which makes me wonder if Sansa Stark is a namesake.

They are considered air purifiers and are even used for treating sick building syndrome.  Kind of like turkey vultures: ominously-named creatures that have a peaceful purpose.

[That turkey vulture link goes to another post of mine from a year ago that I only just discovered I'd never published.  A lost manuscript.  I backdated it, so it looks like I published it a while ago, but anyone investigating its provenance would see is that it's dated exactly a year ago from this moment.]

Snake plants are on the poisonous-to-cats list, but further googling shows people with cats saying (1) they are only mildly toxic, and (2) no one has ever seen a cat try to eat one.  One person reported that her cat destroyed her snake plant, but the cat was not harmed.

Off to OSH.  The woman in customer service looked at my plant and told me all the reasons it died.  Whhnnnahh wnah whnnaaaahh.  (That's the Charlie Brown "adults talking" sound.)  When I mentioned snake plant, looking for approval, she suggested I get a philodendron.  Then I told her I was thinking cactus or maybe something plastic.

I went looking for snake plants and found three puny ones.  I found other plants that you can't kill: lots of dracaenae, but they were more poisonous; bromeliads, but they would have given me nightmares (the online photos don't do the creepiness justice). Also, the "plants you can't kill" site says they require copious water.

I may need to buy a snake plant from a place that really sells plants.  Right, a nursery.  Well, it had better not die.

Chasing a buck

As I was walking up the hill behind the stadium to my car today, I saw some burly college boys by the side of the road.  Were they messing with my car?  No.  They'd noticed the deer that live on the steep hill above the road, and one of them was climbing the hill with a big pointy stick.  They were goading each other on.  I've seen a beautiful buck there (tried to take a picture, but with just an iPhone it's impossible -- they are camouflaged, you know?), and they'd seen it.

"That one has four points!" one said.  It was like watching them become cave men: stick, animal, grunt.

I felt protective of the deer, my special buck whom I'd watched for several minutes the other day in a moment of peacefulness.  Although at the same time I thought, "Steep hill, clumsy oafs -- that deer is going to vanish so fast they won't know what happened."

And yet the boys thought they could do this.  Stick, animal, grunt.

As I came up the hill toward them, I glared.  The presence of a woman?  The presence of a mother figure?  It was funny to watch them turn on each other now that the Other had arrived.  One of them picked up his bag, and as he drifted away from the others he said to them, "Man, you came all the way up here just to chase a deer?"

The other two put on their helmets and together hopped on a single teeny tiny scooter and rode away.

Boys and their toys.