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| Aspidistra elatior by Digigalos CC BY SA |
For quite a number of years now, I've been thinking: "My workspace needs green things." But thinking about how much I'd like a few pot plants around the place and actually making the effort to get them have been two different things. I have been doing the former quite regularly, but the latter? Not so much.
But the other night I finally said to myself: "Bunnings is open until 9.00pm, dangit - go get an aspidistera."
Some months back I bought a lovely pot plant stand for my house, and I went looking for houseplants to keep on it. I did some research for "okay-to-be-indoors, reasonably-hard-to-kill, won't-poison-pets" plants, and aspidistera came in a winner. Aspidisteras and peperomias. But when I went shopping for plants the Bunnings I went to didn't have any aspidistera. I'm not sure how that was possible, because aspidisteras are one of the most common houseplants on the face of the earth.
They also have a really fun name to say: "Aspidistera". Fit it into a sentence and it makes you sound somehow more civilised. "Oh, yes, you'll find that on the coffee table next to the aspidistera."
So, long story short, I went home that day with a couple of peperomia and a trio of ferns, wondering how long it would take for them to show me that I don't know squat about keeping houseplants alive. So far, one of the peperomia is doing quite well (the other is struggling a bit), and one of the ferns is going great guns, while the other two are busy telling me I should have put more thought into my potting mix. They are communicating their displeasure through the medium of dying.
And yet, even though my track record with "keeping plants alive" isn't great, I still want to live surrounded by them.
So I went to Bunnings (a different one) to look for apsidistera. I found some, but instead of buying a small aspidistera plantation (which was my original plan), I suddenly went on a houseplant frenzy and just bought a bunch of things. Aspidistera, dieffenbachia, fikus, boston fern and peace lilly. The fern and the peace lily also have the fun names to say (nephrolepis and spathiphyllum, respectively), but if you say "aspidistera" there's a chance people know what you're talking about. If you say spathiphyllum they think you're having a stroke.
Both the dieffenbachia and the spathiphyllum came with strict instructions to not eat them. Now, I know from my research that they're not safe around pets, which is why I didn't buy any for my house (even though my pet currently doesn't live in my house - long story), and I'm glad they put that information on the plants themselves - but I'm finding the very general warning quite amusing. "May be harmful if eaten". It kind of implies that anyone in the house might give it a crack.
I suppose, in some houses, they might.
Right now I'm surrounded by green things that aren't dead yet. It's only been a few days, but I'm hoping they stick around for a while, because I like my little forest - it makes me smile.
