Former home of a dearly-departed spider plant and cushion moss.For awhile now I've been wanting to enliven the atmosphere in my apartment with a bit of greenery. A normal person would just go out and buy a plant and learn how to care for it. However, normal people have the advantage of not living in near cave-like darkness because they are on the bottom floor and in the center unit of an apartment building surrounded by taller buildings.
I've been researching greenery on-line for some time now trying to find a plant which will both endure the dimness of the cave-like environs of my domicile and the ineptitude of my care. You see, I don't have the best track record when it comes to caring for plants. Some time ago, a friend of mine gave me a black coffee mug with a spider plant growing in it. I warned her that I thought I'd end up killing it and she indignantly informed me that spider plants required very little care and were quite hardy. The only thing I can say about that is that I still have the mug.
During one of my recent runs for milk at a local 99 yen store, I noticed one of the plants they had outside the shop was "cushion moss". Moss is often viewed as a weed in the U.S., but is common in Japanese gardens. I looked up moss and found that it thrives in the shade and needs lots of water. Since I'm not looking for tall plants so much as just something green which won't die on me, I bought one of the tiny moss planters and am going to use it as a test run for my green thumb. If it survives, I'll consider investing in a planter of some sort and expanding the planting.
I do believe that, if a plant could think like we do and conceptualize the world as humans, they would see my purchase of one of them as the equivalent of a knife-wielding maniac descending on some poor helpless puppy and beg me to pick some other specimen and spare its life.
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4 comments:
Something else we have in common. I found that if I look at a plant too often, it dies.
It also dies if I water it, feed it, or do anything other than ignore it. If I ignore it, and Dad takes care of it, it thrives to the point of trying to take over.
We need some essence of Dad to spread on our fingertips to give us green thumbs! ;-)
I have had surprisingly good luck with plants since I moved. My house has many reasonably sized windows which allows in a great deal of light. Not only that, every room has more than one window.
This is a far cry from my parent's house in which every window is small, most rooms have only one window and it is so tightly sealed that cross-ventilation is, frankly, impossible. This was, apparently, the pinnacle of 1970s design and energy efficiency. No plant has been able to survive in this house, save for dearly departed mamaw's Christmas cacti and African violets. She had the touch, to be sure!
Yeah, I'll take my 1940's energy hog of a house any day.
I couldn't live in a place with so little air circulation. I can see how it may be energy efficient, but I love air. My windows are large, but air circulation is poor as is light. I shudder to think how stuffy this place would get with small windows.
My moss is doing okay...though it may take awhile for me to kill moss. ;-)
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