The most ill-treated plant of all

   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.