A sunnyish sort of day in Shropshire, and
the wind has returned to it being from the north, after just one day of warmer
sunshine.
I've just been finishing off planting the
bedding in my garden, which is always a mixture of plants I've grown for that
purpose, and a number which have passed the winter in either the greenhouse, or
my house itself, awaiting that all too brief summer period when they can be
outdoors in the fresh air.
One of the plants which enjoys that
position in my garden is the Spider Plant, Chlorophytum
comosum, which must be the one most ill-treated by people who grow it, and
I have to include myself amongst their number, I'm afraid, because it will
stand almost all degrees of mistreatment. The three specimens in my own garden,
which I was looking at when the thought occurred to me, spent the winter in my
cellar, where there is very little light at any time, but a lot of damp and
cold, yet they emerged from their stay in the depths looking a little anaemic
and spindly, but are flourishing now. And that is the way the plant brings ill
treatment down on itself, because it will survive anything but frost, the slightest
degree of which will kill it.
Chlorophytum
comosum is a native of tropical and southern Africa, though my Flora of South Africa doesn't include it, and naturalized in places such as
Western Australia. It was a forest dweller originally, growing in the congo
rain forest in the beginning, but has been a favourite house plant for many
years. The German philosopher and writer, Johann Goethe wrote about the spider
plants he kept in hanging baskets indoors two hundred years ago. The roots and
the rhizomes of the plant are fleshy and thickened, and serve as water storage
organs for those dry periods when people forget to water them, and the plant
has been shown to reduce air pollution when grown indoors, neutralizing
formaldehyde production in the atmosphere.
In the garden, also during the summer
months only, look out for a plant which does appear in my Flora of South Africa. Plumbago
auriculata, Cape Leadwort, a fast growing, evergreen, woody-stemmed
scrambling climber you often see growing outdoors in Spain, where it can reach
twenty feet tall. Its trusses of sky-blue flowers are carried from summer to
early winter.
