Snow outside, garden inside

A good weekend for staying inside and reading some good books or keeping up with the indoor gardening. Although the weather outside is indeed frightful, indoors there's some blooming going on.

Here's an image of the giant cactus and overgrown aloe plant thriving inside while outside the snow piles up on the fence and in the driveway.

This aloe blooms regularly, sending up long canes with odd little flowers sprouting from them.

Below is a Phalaenopsis I picked up in bloom at Donzell's Garden Center in the fall. After it finished blooming, I fed it some orchid food and new buds began appearing on the old stems. Here is a closeup of a new bloom:


















Below, the thrilling sight of my Lady Macbeth Paphiopedilum budding for the third year in a row. I purchased this orchid via Ebay and it is turning out to be my most successful orchid. It is certainly the most dramatic!





















What could be easier to grow than African violets? I picked up two fancy ones at the same time. They feature ruffly leaves with pink edges and the flowers are a gorgeous purple. The pictures I took today all came out blue for some reason.























Finally, here's a very special amaryllis (actually Hippeastrum) given to me by a graduating student two years ago. I was told that the plant was a daughter bulb from a family heirloom plant that had been maintained since the early part of the 20th century. You can see the phalaenopsis blooming in the background. I keep my indoor plants under fluorescent grow lights all year long.

My secret growing obsession

Allow me to introduce you to Pinocchio, other wise knows as Paphiopedilum Judge Pinocchio
(P. Judge Philip X P. glaucophyllum).
Paphs are also called slipper orchids, for obvious reasons. Pinocchio's slipper shape doubles as a very large schnozzola, all pink but more waxen than wooden.

My orchid arrived via US mail from a grower in Texas. I found it on Ebay, ordered it on a Monday and it arrived three days later, elaborately wrapped in newspaper shreds and sheets, so that the bloom was completely protected. I gave it a good long drink of water, and then set it under the grow lights I have set up . The first bloom dropped within days, but a new bud appeared almost immediately, which is the one you see in these photos.

Underneath this bloom, another bud is beginning to develop, so apparently it has made itself at home here.

The appeals of orchids are many: their amazing variety of shapes, exotic colors and blooms that last for weeks. They don't grow like "normal" house plants, in that you don't stick them in a pot with dirt and drench them with water. Their roots are usually used to attach themselves to tree trunks and branches or to piles of leaf mold and bark on the forest floor. So they must be potted in bits of bark, coconut hull chips, or sphagnum moss. Their roots often grow up over the lip of the pot, reaching out for moisture in the air, so it is wise to place orchids on a tray filled with pebbles and water not to the top of the pebbles. That way, you can set your plants on the pebbles so their roots don't get waterlogged, yet there is plenty of moisture wafting up from the tray.

Nero Wolfe, the famous fictional detective, has a roof top orchid green house in atop his building in NYC. He would take the elevator up to the plant rooms where nobody was allowed to disturb him. For an interesting take on Wolfe and his orchid obsession, read this.

When Rex Stout wrote his Nero Wolfe stories, orchids were not readily available to most people. Nowadays, you can find them at your local home improvement big box store and at various specialty nurseries and event florists. Dendorbriums and phaleonopsis are the types usually on display. They are easy care and quite adaptable to the home environment. And although some rare and collectible orchids are very expensive, most are quite reasonable in price.

I guess I got into orchids because I have had a variety of houseplants over the years, and I was getting bored with the same old plants. Living in this climate, house plants are absolutely essential to maintain my sanity during the cold winter months! Just looking at plants growing happily in my windows gives me comfort and alleviates stress when I come home from work.

Pinocchio is my first paph, but not my last. I just ordered another with a very dramatic name -- Lady Macbeth! She is blood red and arrived yesterday with an enormous bud. I will be posting her picture soon, I hope.

On not giving up

I've had a petunia blooming in my indoor garden all winter long. It's a "wave" petunia variety that has been sharing a large pot with a geranium. I generally bring in one geranium for the winter, but this time I wanted to see how long the petunia would go before giving up. It hasn't given up at all.

That seems to have been the theme of the week -- not giving up. On the local level, the Highland Square community has been rallying around an old theatre to save it for the community. The local theatre critic, reassigned by the Akron Beacon Journal to the Business beat last summer, isn't giving up either and is blogging and freelancing theatre reviews. The arts will not give up in Summit County either.

At the state level, a grassroots group in Stark county did not give up on paying attention to Countywide Landfill. An expert has been called in to test with infrared photography to determine if the landfill is indeed on fire underneath the top layers. The toxic brew underneath could threaten aquifiers, and if it explodes into the air, could release some deadly fumes. We continue to pollute and to reproduce at rates that will have us choking on our own deadly chemical wastes. None of us can afford to give up on this one.

On the national front, Patrick Fitzgerald has doggedly pursued the truth behind the twisted lies of Cheney/Rove/Libby regarding the Valerie Plame Affair (it sounds like a Perry Mason mystery title). I've been following the story every night when I get home from work -- watching the parade of famous journalists enter the court.

Planet-wide global warming is on the minds of most people, if not the Republican White House. A huge collection of experts and countries set out a declaration today. From local to global, we simply cannot give in to defeat.