Green things

I can't bear to let go of green things. I rescued a tall straggly palm-like plant from my in-laws' trash bin. It was leaning over on its muddy roots, and probably had suffered a freeze, but the leaves still had some green, and I couldn't just leave it there. I put in a yogurt container and now it's thriving in my kitchen window. There is also an old, gnarled rosemary plant that we've carted across the country and back, and it finally suffered a freeze in Chicago. We keep it around because periodically, we'll see microscopically tiny, bright green shoots in the bends of what looks only like dead root. The brown, dusty stems now shelter a buried garlic bulb that started sprouting, and, yep, we couldn't bear to throw out.

Every time we move, invariably my beloved elephant begonia (that huge, gorgeous baby on the right) loses a few arms, and I reroot them to start new plants.


And, sadly, it has endured so many moves and clippings that it's about half that size now. But it lives on in many incarnations!

So I'm in agony right now trying to figure out what to do with this stupid pointsettia that my mother-in-law passed on to me after Christmas. I don't want it in the house because, well, Fergus eats just about anything he can wrap his jaws around then throws it up later, and I don't want those leaves to wreak havoc on his delicate guts. But I can't seem to put it out with the trash. Right now the leaves are drying up and falling off, and I sweep them up, and continue waffling on what to do with it. I suppose it will sit on the kitchen counter, getting in my way every day, until I figure that out.