Let’s Talk About My Addiction

Hello, my name is Firda and I’m a plant addict. Right now I have this craving to go to a nursery and buy a boatload of plants and seeds. Last night I gave in to the temptation and bought myself some seeds off eBay, from a nursery in Newfoundland no less. And today I spent all morning browsing eBay for more seeds of exotic plants, but so far I’ve been good and haven’t ordered any more. This would all be fine and dandy if we didn’t live in a cramped apartment and if over half of our dining table wasn’t occupied by potted plants already.

I’m blaming my addiction on my late mother. I used to think that she loved her plants more than she loved me (not true at all, she loved me until the day she died). She’d scrape soil off the gutters for her plants. Having new planters would make her so excitedly happy. She’d ask strangers for cuttings of plants she wanted. She actually had an ICU section for all her plants that weren’t doing well. Knowing that I loved flowers, she’d put her best flowering plants right by my bedroom window and keep them flowering.

Sadly, I had zero interests on plants when my mother was alive. Watering her plants was just a chore, a big pain in the butt, made worse by my jealousy of the plants for getting hours of special attention every day from my mother. When she went away for a month, many of her plants were dying from abandonment by the time she got back (my fault, guilty as charged). I was sure she was going to kill me, but surprisingly, she didn’t make a big fuss of it. I was so relieved. Though I did feel guilty to see the many plants occupying her ICU section afterwards. Of course she nursed them all back to health. She was good at it.

When my mother died, I did what I knew my mum would’ve liked me to do with all the flowers we received from people expressing their condolences. I tried to keep them alive for as long as I could. Since I had zero idea on how to handle flowers, they didn’t last very long. It made me sad and it made me wish I’d inherited my mother’s green thumb.

Well, what do you know. Five years later, here I am. My mother might not have passed her green thumb on to me but she definitely passed me her addiction. I like to think I’m not as big a plant addict as her but I’m getting there for sure. And it all started four years ago, when we bought a peace lily plant from a supermarket to commemorate the first anniversary of my mother’s passing. Since then, the urge to buy and grow more plants just keeps getting stronger and stronger. So you see, it all comes back to her. My mother. The original plant addict among the two of us. Without her blood running in me, I probably wouldn’t recognise the joy of watching tiny little seeds turning into plants.

Just one dark little secret. Unlike my mother, sometimes I wish some of my plants would die a natural death so I could buy some new ones. I think that makes me the Darth Vader of the gardening world or something to that effect. I know it’s evil, but I just can’t help it! Though I’m sure I would stop wishing death upon my plants once we have a house of our own that I could fill up with as many plants as I want. That would be so freakin’ awesome!