I'm in your house plants making more green.

 

I realize that I live in your house plants.

No, I don't mean that I'm doing some sort of weird camping out in your house at night.

*BOO*

I remember being in offices and thinking that the plants that people insisted on keeping in corners in decorative pots looked so green and foreign.  

There were indoor plants and outdoor plants.  If you leave indoor plants outside, eventually you will have more room for other indoor plants because yours just died.

When I was a wee brat, my bedroom was chock full of those kind of plants.  I'd start plants in the winter to be moved outside in the spring, but I was always wary that those plants were not native to my childhood area.

I would see pictures of them in shopping malls and in tropical settings and eventually realize that it was not to be.  Those shopping malls would begin putting palm trees, real palm trees, in their walkways indoors later.

I guess they have a benefit there.  A palm is not a fast growing tree, give it a bit of water and some direct light, and humidity and they would grow well.

Not that that ever happened.   Mall Palms always looked dusty, yellow, and forlorn.

I was outside caring for my own garden this morning.  Even here in South Florida, they do require specialized care.  I keep a bottle of insecticidal soap in the front yard, and another in the back.  5ML of dish soap to 16 ounces of water is the recipe.  Anything I can grow can be safely handled or eaten.

Today was trash day.  Those same plants that you fight to keep green in a stairwell in Willow Grove PA, I snip and hang out the trash can.  Usually a bit of green in the blue can.  I do this so that I know whether the trash has been picked up and I have to go out and roll the thing back to its corral.

Sound a bit... excessive to your Northern Sensibilities?  I have too much of the stuff, any stuff, and if we don't trim it, the city will wonder where the house is.

Hmmm... Maybe a picket fence of Screw Palms across the front?  No, but my yard is chock full of them as well as some multiple colored Crotons that I spotted in a British TV show as a prized gift to the manager in "The IT Crowd".  Meanwhile I propagate those same Crotons across the little garden in front of my porch because... it pleases me.

So I'll crawl out of your house plants and make a few more for later.  If I have new plantings, I can water them, legally, during watering hours every day for a month.  Maybe I can get a late start on my Basil and put in some Pinto Beans for a laugh.

I'm looking out at the shabby little duplex near me and many of those same trees over there were from my garden.  The place has changed hands about four times since I moved in here.  Each time people go, I put more green in there as a friend to one or more of the residents.  

After all, one yard of green is not enough for me.  My other stand of Screw Palms, either red or green are doing well.

Hey, it keeps me arguably honest.  I'm a little bit low on Milkweed, as is the park, so I may just find my seeds again and "accidentally" help things along again, if the butterflies allow it.