Read an Excerpt
Introduction From the road, it looks like any other house. For anyone tooling through town, my home doesn’t really stand out, except perhaps for its preponderance of garden beds visible from the street and the fact that it’s a tad funkier than the neighboring New England architecture in the center of town. Especially in winter, you’d be prone to roll right on by without giving it so much as a second glance. But if you had reason to nose into the driveway, knock on the front door, and slip inside, it would be a whole different story. Basically, if you don’t like plants, don’t bother to enter. Agoraphobics will be just as agri-challenged inside as they are in the field. Because within that unassuming exterior resides a wonderful world of roaming vines and hairy stems. Leaves of all shapes, sizes, textures, scents, and combinations of colors are given free rein. You must brush by them to deliver the FedEx box. It’s necessary to engage with the flower spike of the pregnant onion before gaining entry into the converted barn, where the comfy chair awaits. Watch how you angle the groceries around the kalanchoe, because clumsily maneuvered baggage will bring it down. Only dogs with short tails are allowed in. Wherever it is possible to host plants, my house is wall-to-wall greenery. I didn’t bother doing much with decorator colors on the walls; I didn’t sweat the window treatments or the framed family portraits—the plants are my decor. At any given moment, I host hundreds of houseplants, give or take a couple of dozen. In autumn, the inventory might swell when I crowd more plants inside than the light venues can comfortably host. In winter, the amaryllis and other holiday cheerfuls hold forth. In spring, the accumulation swells with seedlings that are destined for outdoors. For a few brief months in the depths of summer, the head count decreases while the majority of my indoor plants sojourn outside. But I keep many succulents and all my terrariums close by because the home feels empty without their green presence. I can’t live without the jungle of leafy branches and groping vines that I call home. And it’s not as though I don’t have green elsewhere in my life. I garden intensively and extensively outdoors in summer. Every weekend, I hop in the car and visit gardens. Then I spend the rest of the year with the enviable job of writing about summer gardens. But I still couldn’t live without plants sharing my abode. For me it’s all about the plants stretching their limbs, forming their buds, expanding new leaves, and responding to my nurturing (or neglect, if called for). And that sensation—that intimacy with nature—is what I strive to describe in this book. If nothing else, this is the chronicle of a romance between botany and a kid who craves green. But under that thin veneer is an ill-concealed attempt to convert you. I’m hoping you’ll buy into this. I’m doing my best to demonstrate how plants can change your psyche when you welcome them into your life. It’s radical. It’s the difference between holding nature at arm’s length and embracing it into the heart of your home. But don’t take my word for it—give plants a chance. Live intimately with them. Let them connect. Experience their cycles and rhythms. Flow them into your agenda. Encourage those tendrils to meander into your everyday experience so they’re inextricably woven into your life. Do it with all the style, creativity, and devotion that you lavish on the other aspects of your life. Do it with the fervor you pour on your pets, for example, and you could end up starting a sweet relationship. Here, in the pages that follow, are the tools you’ll need to achieve your in-house botanical bond.
