Home Is Where the Vegetation Is

This is the part of my house where I feel most at home, so 100+ degree days are kind of a bitch.


I love the plants that have a story - in other words, plants that I've inherited, been given, dug up out of a driveway crack in Corpus, or otherwise rescued. I guess the lamb's ear from Great Outdoors had a story too, but it was an extremely short one.

Here's Spikey, the Corpus crack weed. He seems to like it better in Austin just as much as I do - well, he and his multitude of spikey offspring. I moved his pot into the dirt planter bed to let such of them take root as wanted to.


Here's another one from Corpus. I don't know what he is, but when we first moved there, a neighbor gave him to Eric - a bare, six-inch-tall stalk sporting a single leaf at the top (the plant, not Eric).


Next to him are some small aloe plants my ex-mother-in-law gave to Eric in a pot, neglecting to mention that they were not actually rooted in any soil. I planted them in a tin pail Anna was growing other succulents in for class. All of them are coming along pretty nicely. Another aloe wasn't doing so well and I'm experimenting to see if I can revive it in a cup of water. It seems to be working. The plant is sending out roots, and has changed from gray to green; I'll put it in dirt soon.

These are, left to right, some clippings from a variegated sweet-pea plant I bought at Great Outdoors, and a rescue plant abandoned by one of my sister Margie's ex-boyfriends. I actually purchased the sweet-pea as a gift for Margie, but took clippings before I gave it to her.

Hers promptly died.


The rest of the gang includes the large, water-loving lily I got as a birthday gift from a client in Tennessee, a succulent box garden given to Eric by his grandmother, a hanging basket with clippings from yet another plant abandoned by Margie's herbicidal maniac ex-boyfriend, a very tiny cactus from Robbie I just brought home from the office yesterday, ice plant clippings from my former coworker Butch, a shrub Robbie and I picked beside Blunn Creek at lunchtime one day, and more pothos ivy than you can shake a stick at.

Can you imagine a more perfect place to enjoy the shade of a giant oak tree on a sweltering Austin evening?