[ Lost in the Landscape ]

in the greenhouse, or, the dictator’s wife

I was in the green­house Fri­day morn­ing, water­ing some pots of seedlings. It seemed funny for a sec­ond, because out­side the green­house it was rain­ing. If I hadn’t gone in there with the hose that morn­ing, the seedlings would have died in the desert for lack of water.

(Left, a Euphor­bia chara­cias ssp. wulfenii out­side the green­house, bloom­ing away in the rain.)

I used to grow and breed pha­laenop­sis orchids in the green­house. It was gonzo amounts of work to keep up with repot­ting hun­dreds of plants. And try­ing to con­coct an envi­ron­ment that would fool the orchids into think­ing that they were in the low­lands of the Philip­pines instead of the flats of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia wasn’t that easy either. In addi­tion to all the work, the green­house was an energy pig, tak­ing as much nat­ural gas to heat as the entire house.

So, end of orchid obses­sion. End of heat­ing the out­doors and wast­ing all that energy. (The New York Times has a recent piece on a cou­ple who decided to build them­selves a green­house. Their heater hasn’t arrived yet, but they’re already way over budget.)

Now that the trop­i­cal orchid episode of my life has ended the green­house is only heated by the sun via the green­house effect. At this time of year it’s handy to have a spot that will help give young plants a head start on spring. That’s pretty much how I use the green­house now.

And, um, yes, for a place to store gar­den clut­ter. Sort of a gar­den shed with windows…

For­tu­nately the win­dows are an opaque fiber­glass, so all the mess inside is obscured. Maybe even a lit­tle mys­te­ri­ous and poetic. Here are some pot­ted plants as seen from the outside.

As I was water­ing the plants in my lit­tle arti­fi­cial out­door desert I thought back to the 1980s. One the sto­ries from the news that has stuck in my brain all these years was a report on Michèle Ben­nett, the wife of Haiti’s dic­ta­tor, Baby Doc Duva­lier. The cou­ple was bad news all around, and one of Michèle’s vices was that she’d refrig­er­ate a part of the palace so that she and her friends could strut about in the fur coats that they col­lected. (Com­pared to her husband’s bru­tal ways, it all seems pretty minor, of course.)

Mink and fox and chin­chilla coats in Haiti. About as ratio­nal as a green­house full of warm trop­i­cal orchids in San Diego, I thought.

I guess we all want a lit­tle of of what doesn’t come eas­ily or nat­u­rally. But in an age of a grow­ing aware­ness of the need to live greener it’s good to stand back and see what we really need.

January 25 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: green living • greenhouse effect • greenhouses • Michele Bennett • orchids • solar energy • watering | 5 Comments »