Monday 23 September 2013

savage garden

These flowers with up-turned petals that hide their plant-business below are a variety of Alpen-glรถckchen (Soldanella, little coins in Latin but I guess in English, they're known as snowbells) remind me of the piranha plants of Super Mario Brothers. They unfortunately are rather delicate and fussy things and tend not to do well in captivity. Another long-term inmate is blooming upside-down, whose made of sturdier stuff, more adapted to neglect and smothering, with an ugly little flower unfolding. This Zanzibar Gem (Zamioculcas zamiifolia—also called the ZZ Plant, a Zamie or eine Glรผcksfeder) or most-fittingly the Eternity Plant.
Though not a tuber, like a potato or a tulip, it forms bulbous reservoirs of water at its base that can (within reason) be either stored for drier times or squished, transmuted into leaf-form in response to the environment—or the watering-can. H had had one for years that I fawned over and over-watered but I am glad we have an understudy doing well. Not that I mind these untraditional flowers one bit, but I had the notion that house-plants that require a certain maturity before blooming, unlike the weird probing cactus, the baobab trees and the giant schefflera that has been proudly sprouting these little giraffe horns every year since would only do it once and take a rest from such activities.