plants, they exist


est malade
there was this one time i lived with people and relationships were severely strained, a very depressing time. when this happened i noticed the few plants we had stopped growing or whithered and died. this was the exact moment i realised they were living things. to be fair i didn't notice my brother and sisters existed until fairly late too but plants were always outside my field of vision, even when i was surrounded by them. i think it's to do with pace. plants seem lifeless to young people and we must seem a blur to them always.

if gardening is about an affinity with plants, a partnership, my gran's garden was a wild love affair. the house was always littered with sachets of seeds smuggled from different places, waiting to take root in her care. i remember the front and especially the back of the house, a dense oasis of ferns, flowers, delicate plants and an apricot tree, light piercing through the foliage. the toolshed was overgrown, everything was overgrown, but in a harmonious way. in her last years nurses and daughters began to discourage my gran's forays into the garden, and so it lost its colour and her mind faded away. today the garden is at the hands of my aunt and it is more organised, more neatly defined than it ever was with gran. a reflection of the way people shape things around them but more, i think, of how plants react to people.

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
How can young people be encouraged to take more interest in plants?



that might have something to do with the plants not being fed? i used to be very close to plants when i was little, possibly not hyperbolic to say i could name many dozens of varieties when i was about 4 years old, but i can't recall anthropomorphizing them

the finest among them were always those that did their own thing and didn't need to be nurtured


est malade
i agree. there is controlled neglect as well, i like that.

i didn't realise i was anthropomorphizing. i don't talk to them, i think. no, actually i do! i'll be talking to rocks soon enough.

edit: sorry your post changed and the daffodils bit came up, i don't hate daffodils. i don't even know what they look like, actually.
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Plants are rubbish, though. I didn't think anything could be more tedious than animals, but I was wrong.


there are no accidents
BBC's Private Life of Plants is fascinating. I wish the series was 100 episodes... best entertainment money can buy (or broadband download)


i absolutley love plants and i really wish i had a garden.
i am hopefully going to do a beginners course in herbal medicine soon, i'm quite cynical about herbal medicine overall, but i want to prove myself wrong, also i'm hopefully going to do a course in mycology.


^^ i miss having a balcony or a deck. i used to have fantastic organic bucket gardens. notthing too elaborate, but i grew heaps of cherry tomatoes and basil. fresh pasta sauces all summer and pesto through fall and winter. i loved going out and getting my hands dirty with them. gardening can be really meditative.

a mycology course would be very cool. the audobon pocket mushroom guide is excellent if you're looking for one. i miss picking mushrooms with my grandparents. the ones in manitoba were more or less the same as the ones they picked in belarus so we'd go picking all the time between spring and fall. up at 4 am and in the forest as the sun came up. boletes, chantrelles, butter mushrooms - we'd come back with a car trunk full of them. supposedly french chefs would fly over to pick in that area.

made me think of this
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Mr. Tea

Shub-Niggurath, Please
I love picking mushrooms. Got quite a haul last autumn in Epping Forest on the outskirts of London. Made a huge pie and had enough left over for omelettes the next day. Would have cost a fortune buying that much in a supermarket, and they only stock a few common varieties.


I once had a flatmate who bought a venus fly trap, but didn't really have any spare flies, so we fed it some cheese. Sadly it expired after a few days.

If anyone wants to recapture desolate early 80s despair, get some hydrangeas, they were all the rage back then. The flocked wallpaper of the plant world.

I wouldn't mind growing a sunflower, or a couple of screaming cacti, if they exist.


entered apprentice
I used to be amusingly into my Cacti and Succulents (the same sort of thing but without the spines) as a child, they are quite good cos they withstand relatively large amounts of neglect. Then when they DO die, its hard to tell for quite a while. The difficult thing is to get the flowering Cacti to flower, never did manage that...


heavy heavy monster sound
When I was about 5, I asked my mum why she talked to the plants and she said it was because they grew if you talked to them.

About an hour later I was found in the greenhouse standing in front of the plants chanting
"Die. Die. Die. Die".

To this day I just have to look at a plant and it withers, I wish I was better with them. I recently bought a plant for the windowsill and put it out and the next day it wasn't there. I looked down and it was lying on the ground, it had jumped off the sill and committed suicide rather than be around me.


Hehe, Sloane, I can almost picture that.

This is probably another huge strike against me in dissensians' eyes, but I've never much cared for plants indoors. I can appreciate natural beauty when it's outside, or enframed by a Frank Lloyd Wright home with a creek running over it that blends into the landscape, but I've always hated potted plants indoors. Maybe it's the association with dentists and other ugly utilitarian office spaces, the tackiness of them. It always looks better to me when spaces like that accept their manmade fate and do the ultra-contemporary (if without imagination, at least clean lines and tranquil organizational principles at work) decor with maybe some vases full of weird abstract wooden sticks or something if absolutely necessary (to ground us in our biology, I guess?). Potted plants also smack of that whole "zoo" thing where I fail to see how containing nature so artificially for human enjoyment is doing nature any favors. (You love dogs so much? Is that why you keep it imprisoned all day in your apartment, just to anticipate getting walked in your handbag once a day for 10 minutes?)

I'm also allergic to pollens, maybe that's my problem...