This Fantastic Earth

Breathe in, and the soil and rain will fulfill your dreams of green growing spring and lush summer gardens, resounding in exuberant flushes of leaf of blossom of acrospire and plumule.  The air is heavy with deliberate humidity, and the glass windows of the greenhouse are fogged, with moss growing in any crevice.  Today a friend and I packed Sunday in and left it home, to view the indoor garden climates designed originally as part of the Olmstead system of parks.  The orchid society was having its show, and the plants were so vigorous and friendly, they seemed ready to climb out of their pots and perform stemmed minuets.

Components of blossoms reveal intricate delicacies complex as a small finch's wing, or as thick and heavy as wax sculptures folded over sunset colors.  They traveled from the grower's home to exhibit, and weathered the trip well.   But oh, the frilled, the rippled, the cupped and cockled shapes threw colors in tropical saturation, beguiling the viewer with a salmagundi of the rainbow, some fragrant as hedonism.

Huge moth orchids, the phalaenopsis, filled their stems with the largest blooms that will last at least two months in hospitable environments.  They had been coaxed into multiple stems and blossoms, their heads nodding to gravity, often requiring stabilization from supports.  Dendrobiums cascaded in falls of over twenty blossoms to a stem; cattleyas, the orchid you usually see depicted in drawings and Eugene the Jeep cartoons, lent their heady fragrance but only last a few days before dropping in exhaustion.  To have benches and tables filled with these beings was like being at a candy shop, an exotic pastry store, or  being momentarily caught in a kaleidoscope.

The two of us rounded the entire greenhouse with its differing biospheres, each room demonstrating in variations of green how diverse the plant kingdom is.  Ingenious cactus, determined vines, and a few carnivorous hoaxes to capture living insects filled the conservatory with plots of success and intent.  You could feel the oxygen given off by the plants; you could feel your carbon dioxide being inhaled by a million leaves.  So sensitive to light, you wonder if they sense your presence as a temporary eclipse of the sun, a shadow that produces both breath and heat.  Do they have rudimentary eyes, such as the third eye of the Komodo dragon that is centered in its forehead, detecting purely changes in light and dark?  Do. they. see. us?  A wonder.

Just as some fold leaves close to stem at night, so do we in our own manner.  Winding down, we call it, and try to end the day on a quiet note in a book, a conversation, a sit on the couch.  My own plants at home are perking up a bit at the longer light of the days, some in blossom here and there; the Christmas cactus, the goldfish plant, the oxalis.  Neither of the two orchids produced this winter, and maybe are waiting for a repot, a bit of extra tending.  We all would like that.

Tend to yourself and your loved ones whether two legged, or four, rooted or other.  Find clean sheets and pillow cases, lucky you if you can hang them outside to dry.  Ach, how I miss a yard!  But never mind, when it is nighttime everything is the same.  Tomorrow is the last day of February, and we slide forth into the windy month of March all filled with hares, Ides, and madness.  I have had enough winter, and wish to be a night nearer to the time of new shoots.  Watch the plants, they will tell you.  Sleep all, sleep well.