These little Chicken Gizzard ( Iresine herbstii ) cuttings will one day be all grown up. Gizzards are favorite indoor plant of all time. I'm told they actually do look like chicken gizzards -- I do not know if the is true since I have never gutted a chicken or plan to anytime before the global thermal nuclear war hits.

(hoping most of you are indulging me)

My dining room row: Pink Calla/Chicken Gizzard/Xmas Cactus/Yellow Calla


I love that Chicken Gizzard. When I first got it a few months back it looked like this:
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Everyone was so impressed
that I was able to pull down
these branches from a
overachieving Bottle Brush
tree. Men had failed to
achieve this feat, but I, a
mere woman, succeeded.
They don't have to know
that the limbs snapped,
fell and buried me alive
during my effort; they
simply need to know that
I got it down with my sheer
brute strength.

I have a huge cut on my bum from my brawl with that damn blackberry bush. But I got my revenge this morning: I watched the green recycling truck pick up those spiked branches and take them to be ground and crushed into tiny pieces of mulch. Don't mess with me you you you evil blackberry nemesis!

I did some major weeding earlier--the backyard was a mess from the rainy season. I got slapped twice in the face by a limb, scratched and impaled many times by blackberry vines and goosed by another thorny plant. I only put a dent in the work and I'll all beat up.

Welcome mobilemum and darkpurple.

According to some of the good people at gardening this snowball tree that grows outside my house is likely the Chinese Snowball Viburnum macrocephalum. Isn't it so pretty?

I have a friend that gets excited by appliances. When I got a new washing machine she asked to come over and see it. I don't get the attraction with these things. Then I suppose I don't get why my mother has 2 walk-in closet full of clothes, or why my sister-in-laws have so many shoes for so many climates when they live in a place where the weather never changes. And I don't get men and their multiple cars or anything about their love of machinery that they fiddle with and restore more easily than their female relationships. I also wonder at those people that have SUVs larger than their trailer home.

Me? I get excited by two things: Books and Plants. I go to the library and take cuttings to save money, but in the end my bills show payments mostly to Amazon, Half Books, Barnes and Noble, Cody's, Home Depot, Berkeley Nursery, Flowerland. Perhaps all those years of waiting for something to happen in my small town trained me in the art of patience, in waiting for that plant to grow, in sitting and finishing that story. Or perhaps it is just that my personality is of the cat kind: alien, composed, solitary and observant. I've killed plants and have not understood books but I continue this madness.

I know I have a lot of book lovers here but why not try planting something? You may love the mindlessness of the digging, the pure energy, the simple physical response with thought.

Two strange things: I never found out who left that Rubber plant on my doorstep. And wild turkeys have invaded Berkeley:

A rubber plant mysteriously appeared on my porch. Ficus elastica. I was home all day yesterday -- a friend would have knocked, left a note, warned me of this new care instead of leaving it in secret. Did some passerby peek through my window and see my "Jungle" (as my dad calls it) and decide to make a donation to my already full home? Like a lost kitten I have taken it in and cared for it.

My first, and likely only, gardenia blossom has appeared and already has begun to perfume the air. I know they aren't fit for the Mediterranean climate. The shrub is dwarfed and struggling; but how exotic the sole flower looks, so delicate and brilliant white against the dull stucco.

I received an email from my cousin Beatriz in Ecuador. Memories are flooding back of her childhood visits to the US. What fun we had.