The Concrete Jungle

One of the great things about regularly visiting WordPress is you get to see some amazing posts featuring beautiful, spectacular photography of all types of trees, plants, flowers, and greenery.

This is NOT one of those posts.

I instead welcome you to a brief tour of some living things at our spot in the concrete jungle known as suburban Philadelphia.

First up, the ficus. This tree was a gift from my wife’s mother ten years ago. We had never taken possession of a ficus before and with our well-known, family reputation of being serial killers of anything green, this also started out like it would be DOA. We put a couple of Christmas ornaments on it the year we got it to dress it up a bit, figuring we’d surely put it out of its misery after the New Year…

However, post-Holidays we changed our minds and instead tried to provide enough food and encouragement to correct its downward trajectory. Today it looks like this…

It has even been cut back a couple of times. Regular readers of this space will note Snowy McSnowface off to the left. It also is doing well during its first summer here…no doubt getting encouragement from the ficus.

Second, the pepper plant. This gift was given to us by my mother eight years ago. Again, no familiarity. It started out slowly, but morphed over time to periodically produce many mini-peppers. We dry the seeds and repurpose them into the plant just to watch it take off again…

Third, the evergreen. We bought this tree for ourselves ten years ago after having carved out some planting space between two holly bushes in the front of the house. We decorated it for Christmas that first year. Here’s how it looked then…

And here is how it looks today…

Finally, last Christmas (in addition to the afore-mentioned Snowy) we bought a poinsettia plant. We have a long, shameful history of epic fails when it comes to this species, but we figured we’d work diligently post-Holidays to keep it alive and nurse it towards another Christmas. So far, so good…

Thanks for taking this tour of our “jungle.” I never thought we’d achieve green thumb status…but we’re thumbs up for these modest success stories.

 

Picture Courtesy iStock

16 thoughts on “The Concrete Jungle”

  2. You’ve done really well. I too am a serial plant-killer, however I’ve found I can do a great job with orchids and carniverous plants so there’s that. That ficus is a beauty, lovely shape to it.

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