The Plant Hospital

Thursday morning I was doing dishes when I noticed the sun hitting this glass in just the right way, creating a halo on the counter. Kind of cool!

All this hanging around the house is starting to get to me. Yesterday felt very frustrating. I walked the dog; I went to the grocery store. I'm usually the kind of person who finds enjoyment even in small, routine tasks, and I'm not easily bored. But the sameness of my days feels numbing.

Sure, I still have things to do. I read (still not caught up on my New Yorkers!), I shuffle around in the garden. I think I need to take myself on another long dog-free walk -- I need to stretch my legs, and Olga, who is usually such a reliable walker, has become much more finicky about when and where she wants to go. She used to refuse to walk in the rain; sometimes now she refuses on sunny days, for no apparent reason at all. She's just not in the mood, I guess. But then I wind up not walking, and that's not good.

Anyway, I know this is nothing different from what many of us are experiencing. We've all mentioned the "Groundhog Day" phenomenon.

While at the grocery store, I picked up a couple of bedraggled foxgloves that appeared to need a home. I always go for the saddest ones on the plant shelf -- these two were droopy and broken and in desperate need of water. We've already got a million foxgloves but we can always use a few more; the bees love them.

Speaking of rehabilitating plants, here's an update on our plant hospital:

I rescued this jade plant from Mrs. Kravitz's garden waste bag. It sat untended at the side of her house for weeks and many of the leaves had turned yellow; she pulled it up and threw it away. But it still had plenty of roots attached, so I thought I'd try to rehabilitate it. As you can see, it's doing quite well -- the yellow leaves are turning green again, which I didn't even know was possible.

I found this sad-looking pelargonium about a week ago in the cemetery. Someone had dumped it out of its pot near the back wall. I brought the entire root ball home (it was very dry) and put it in a pot. It has perked up since then, but it's probably not going to look like much this season. We'll see!

Remember the discarded ficus tree I rescued back in February? Well, this is what it looks like now. The top is still just dry sticks, and is probably mostly dead. But we have new little leaves sprouting from the bottom. I'm going to wait a bit longer, until it leafs out more, and then I'll prune the dead stuff away. This is apparently going to be a slow recovery.

To the right you can see a Christmas cactus I grew from some pieces that broke off our library cactus last September. The bigger pieces didn't survive -- they were on woody stalks that apparently were unable to grow roots -- but the smaller ones are growing like crazy.

That dracaena in the background, immediately behind the ficus, is a rescue too. When I found it, it had no pot and barely any leaves (fourth photo down in this post) but now it's looking happy.