Thorns and thistles

My black thumb has all but failed me. That’s what I always called my tendency to annihilate anything green. I am a walking herbicide, the John Wayne Gacy of potted plants, luring them home with smiley faces and promises and then cravenly murdering them and burying the remains.

Lately, weird things are sprouting all around me and I’m helpless to stop it. To be sure, one of my more expensive orchids finally gave up the ghost, so I haven’t completely lost my touch. But then this weird thistle bloomed near my mailbox, like some wilderness pioneer homesteading here, or a lost foreigner unable to speak the language of properly manicured lawns.

It was too pretty, in an untamed and mildly dangerous way, so I left it. Someday I will have a forest of thistles on my lawn and then sell the house to someone who will dump lethal chemicals on it and as punishment grow awful tumors the size of baseballs. But I digress.

Three huge pots of ginger have spent the last four years sending up leafy shoots that are neither attractive nor useful. Mostly they give my yard an unneeded jungle motif, as if it weren’t overgrown enough. No flowers. Until now. Can you believe it? And here I was ready to chop up the roots for tea. The fragile orange-red flowers that peep from their cones for a few hours apiece are a disappointment overall, but I don’t tell them that. I cheer them on like Olympians. I’m like that.

The bromeliads decided to send up two cabbage-sized, prickly pink flowers – gorgeous, again in a rugged, don’t-mess-with me way. Unlike roses, which flower promiscuously all over the yard, and for whom I lost all respect long ago.

Note that things with thorns and thistles and sharp edges seem to like me. I’m not sure what that says about me.

Okay, this is the hardest part for me to believe: one of my orchids is sending up two blossoms. Seriously. I’m not holding my breath, as there’s still plenty of time for it to change its mind and die.

Comments

[plosh]

Ah, but you may have the black thumb yet. That's because the bromeliad and ginger plant are in the watering can reach of Minitaur, who has emptied the local watershed to make your ginger plants bloom.

And don't forget, the orchid that is about to bloom is where we dump Minitaur's unfinished water bottles.

So your record is intact.