It seems that all indications are that I am a plant addict. There are worse addictions you could have but I do find myself wondering where this obsession with plants comes from. There isn’t any one else in my family that I know of who is a keen gardener let alone a plant addict. I suspect some of my interest goes back to childhood visits to my aunt and her mother’s small suburban garden. I remember being fascinated by her tiny greenhouse which was always bursting with plants. I can’t tell you any more than that as the memories are more of a feeling and an image rather than anything specific.
When I was slightly older I remember rescuing iris rhizomes from a building site when my parents were extending a house. I planted them carefully and for some reason added ashes from our fire; presumably I had overheard something on the television but I remember one of the builders congratulating me at the time on it. I also had giant sunflowers and strawberry plants all growing in a small cleared area of the derelict garden.
Through my early adult life, bringing up my children single-handed, my small gardens were always an escape but it wasn’t until I moved to this house with its blank canvas of a garden that, with fewer parenting duties, my passion for the garden was unleashed. Online encounters showed me that the wealth of plants out there was huge, and this was reinforced when I joined my local HPS group coming home from my first meeting concluding that I knew nothing. But I need a challenge in life, and have a thirst for knowledge and one thing leads to another and slowly by surely my passion has grown.
Not only has my passion grown but it has started to be refined. Instead of being like a kid in a sweet shop wanting everything and anything I am finding that I have particular obsessions and passions. Bulbs, ferns, epimediums, irises all make my heart quicken and then there is interesting foliage and plants with an exotic feel. And we mustn’t forget the thrill you get from growing something unusual or growing something difficult from seed. I could go on.
So yes I am a plant addict. My facebook wall is covered in plant pictures, I follow many nurserymen on twitter and my shelves groan with specialist books and seed catalogues but it makes me happy.
This post was written in response to today’s Writing 101 assignment entitled Mine your Mind. You had to look at your online interactions for inspiration. My facebook is full of plants, my twitter likes are generally plant pictures, the most popular searches to my blog are about specific plants, my top posts are about plants. There really is no getting away from it.
