Posts under ‘Plants’

Earlier this year, someone gave me a plant. “You don’t understand,” I said. “I’m terrible at watering plants.” He explained it was the kind that didn’t require much care, just watering once a week, and that it was the kind of plant that helped purify the air. He’d put a lot of thought into the [...]

Not long after I told the world about my plantsitting duties last week, and publicly admitted that I had no idea what kind of plants I was watching, I went over to the windowsill in my office and turned the larger plant around, figuring it was ready for a little change in the angle of [...]

Late last week, an email came through from a coworker asking for a plantsitter for the week. She and her family would be on vacation, and the last time she left her two plants for a week sans an official watering agent, they nearly keeled over from dehydration. I will admit not immediately hitting reply [...]

A hot debate ensued at our office staff meeting yesterday. Our big conference room? It has no outside windows. People want something to keep themselves focused and engaged at meetings. Options were bandied about: Floam. Some kind of environmentally-sound knock-off of Silly Putty. Knitting. “There’s no life in here,” said one co-worker. “What if we [...]

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Flickr lately, engrossed in a project to use my camera as a visual journal of 2009, and the site recently introduced the Flickr Clock, which provides narrow bands of color plucked from videos uploaded to the Flickr Clock group, and arranges them along a running timeline to [...]

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m a big fan of Amy Stewart, who blogs at Dirt and Garden Rant, and who writes great books about the wild, wonderful world of plants. So, it should come as no surprise that I was delighted to learn that her next book, Wicked Plants: A Book [...]

While Lauren and I were locked deep in conversation with a Victory Garden visitor (Well, let me be honest about this…said visitor was expounding on the lack of grocery stores in the Tenderloin and the state of Grocery Nation in San Francisco, and Lauren and I were more trapped than locked deep…), I noticed a [...]

It’s one thing not to clean up your garden for the winter, but leaving the hanging basket up on your front porch with a dead plant for several months in a row? That’s crazy talk. Or crazy doing. Whatever it is called, I did it. There was a point in the winter when I just [...]

Although I have professed my love for the flowering trees of D.C. (and, oh yes, that does include the cherry blossoms), I’ve got to admit – I never spent much time when I lived there thinking about their symbolism. I mean, the cherry trees? To me, they symbolized the hurray of Spring, and they symbolized [...]

I’m going to admit a weakness for Twitter, an online microblogging service I once discounted as totally stupid and now? Now? I’m completely hooked. It was through Twitter’s blog that I learned about a service that just might have solved my aloe problem: Botanicalls. This company has set up plants that actually send you a [...]