Monday morning. As colder weather is expected later in the week, we’ve begun the process of bringing in our plants for the winter. The Norfolk Island Pine is in, as are the two lacy asparagus ferns, both of which are in the full flush of new growth, which they put forth every year at this time; and yesterday, we moved the big philodendron — this time around, we were barely able to get it through the door. But it looks good by the old piano and beside our little maple rocking chair — an arrangement that makes it possible, almost, to sit in its shade. This will, though, make it a bit of a stretch to reach the old books on top of the piano: eight volumes from the 1857 “Household Edition” of Walter Scott’s Waverly Novels, and nineteen volumes of an even older set of the works of Jonathan Swift, published around 1812 or 1813. We also brought in one pot containing three angel wing begonias about five feet tall. And we still have the jade plants to bring in, and two or three other odds and ends either to trim and bring in, or to keep in the garage.
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Picked the remaining peppers, amounting to a small box of fall yellows, oranges, and greens; after which the plants were cut back to where they first begin to branch out, leaving a small amount of healthy green growth; the rest was cut into small pieces and left on their portion of the rain-soaked garden floor, making a nice green carpet of stems and leaves.
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Read the sixty-fifth, sixty-sixth, sixty-seventh, sixty-eighth, sixty-ninth, and seventieth chapters of Middlemarch.
Someone highly susceptible to the contemplation of a fine act has said, that it produces a sort of regenerating shudder through the frame, and makes one feel ready to begin a new life.
October 23, 2023.
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[ 1906 ]
Categories: If It Had A Name
Tags: Angel Wing Begonias, Cold, Fall, Ferns, Gardening, George Eliot, Houseplants, Jade Plants, Jonathan Swift, Journals, Middlemarch, Old Books, Peppers, Philodendrons, Pianos, Pines, Rain, Reading, Walter Scott
William Michaelian 