This old house.
Alis and I talked in the car on the way home from Half Moon Bay. We had spent the morning, just the two of us, in our now usual way, which is to say that we went first to the plant nursery there and then had lunch and coffee. Gorgeous sunshine. Her car was riding low in back with the weight of two oversized terracotta pots, big enough for either of us to sit in, lying on their sides in the back of her white wagon, and an overgrowth of pink grasses, red-violet oxalis, chartreuse cedar, etc. We talked, the way we do when we are making up for lost time, rushing through important topics in order to make room for the smaller musings that really connect us as friends.
“My old house is so high maintenance,” she began, about her little white cottage on the mountain. “It tells me precisely what it wants, and this makes shopping both easy and challenging. There is no room for compromise with her.” (Her, meaning, her house.) “Oh, and by the way, did I tell you about Seth and the house ghost?”
We laughed about the ghost incident, which is not alltogether surprising, given the context of our conversations, but then moved quickly back to plants, because I am convinced that this is the root of our friendship, regardless of the fact that we met in art school, when neither grew nor spoke of plants much, aside from what we ate and what we may or may not have watched others inhale.
“You know, I would have never planted primroses this fall if I hadn’t seen that one potted red primrose in your garden during the Christmas party. And then I fell in love with the idea of pale yellow petunias sharing the pot with the misacanthus,” I mused.
“A landscape architect friend of mine and I were talking the other day about how growing older and having kids has affected our gardening style,” Alis replied, “She and I have been friends for a long time, and after she started a family, she gave me a tip. She told me that I would start craving the most unusual, chintzy plant combinations that I never would have expected of anyone, save perhaps Grandma or Aunt Mae.”
Lo and behold! She was right. Look at those carmine primroses! The array of red flowerpots in the front entry, saccharin pansies and petunias. And ornamental cabbage, something I believed, for the longest time, to be the winter flowerbed choice of green-thumbed Asian seniors, has now become the winter doodles for my garden, as well as hers. It fills in with foliose texture and homeliness to exploding containers otherwise full of purple fountain grasses and chartruse millet. It works overtime trying to please me. And how so! I bought a whole flat of it and completely overused it in the containers, filling far too many corners of brown earth with the laquered porcelain tackiness that walks the fine line between experimentally curious and unabashedly tacky.
I can’t plant enough violas, and the cyclamen practically dominated the interior of our home this Christmas. I’m wintering the succulents in the mudroom but I am reconsidering placing a citrus tree in there too, in between the overflowing shoe basket and the two easels. I could go on and on. And I blame my chintzy plant obsession on this old house (1930) and the simple fact that I, too, am growing senile and ironically, quite broody.
Are Alis and I just noticing this ourselves, or are you, too, seeing your taste shift with age? I’m curious.
