FOR years now, my foyer has been a halfway house for indoor plants — that is, halfway between a cozy berth in someone else’s home and a pauper’s grave in my backyard.
I killed some of these plants gladly. Before leaving Minneapolis for New York, my friend Julie bestowed on me a 12-foot-long asparagus fern with wicked spines and an anger management problem. Meanwhile, the spider plant she left seemed to drop another clone every time I slept. (Out-of-control asexual reproduction is surely the stuff of nightmares.) By the time Julie moved back to Minneapolis seven years later, I’d terminated them both. Plants need water, you know.
Other houseplants were beautiful — until I got my blundering hands on them. A jade plant dropped its emerald leaves, as round and smooth as river stones. A Dracaena marginata with a mop top rotted from the soil up. My mother-in-law, her rooms overflowing with verdure, passed along a parlor maple (Abutilon striatum). It had flowers like crepe paper, the color of a Cape Cod sunrise. This one I drowned.
To read the rest of this story please go to: Costa Farms News