Mar 28, 2015
On a day when spring could not seem further away, my chives decided to poke back up. An lovely, unexpected surprise! (Taken with instagram.)
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Indonesia
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Philippines
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from Sri Lanka
On a day when spring could not seem further away, my chives decided to poke back up. An lovely, unexpected surprise! (Taken with instagram.)
Mandevilla vines beginning to wrap on the ledge railing. (Taken with instagram.)
Last weekend, my brother came to visit and be brought my plants back to Brooklyn. For a little while they were all on the floor in my bedroom again, but then, last Monday, I pulled them out of the boxes and replenished soil that had eroded and put my sedum into a bigger pot. And planted my new poppies and my lantana -- one of the few annuals that I can't resist. And so, after two years, and all sort of things I never could have expected, I've got my ledge garden back.
Good morning, chives. (Taken with instagram.)
Sunday morning sun on my ledge. (Taken with instagram.)
Grass growing on my ledge. I’m back in Brooklyn, I hope. (Taken with instagram.)
The Art of Losing
Over Martin Luther King Day, I officially dismantled the ledge garden and left the apartment in Brooklyn that I’ve called home for the past four years. I brought all of the plants on my ledge to my parent’s house in Connecticut. And, correspondingly, I think I’m also going to officially retire the my ledge garden tag.
To those of you in different timezones and hemispheres, to the gardeners out there who follow me, my plants moved from zone 7b to 6b, and so really, the gardening concerns are minimal. Also, because everything was in containers, I didn’t have to leave anything behind. I filled the trunk of the car with all of the plants and wedged them all and they protected each other. So really, this post isn’t about gardening and it isn’t about plants. It’s about that silly ledge.
It’s about that apartment with its thin walls and its one stupid closet and its noisy upstairs neighbors and its broken windows and its leaking bathtub faucet. An apartment that I thought that maybe we’d outgrown. There were postings in the neighborhood for newer, nicer places in the same price range. There were postings for older, smaller spaces with real outdoor spaces — not just a silly ledge — in the same price range. There were postings for much smaller places in Manhattan in the same price range. Yes, it was an apartment that I thought that we’d outgrown.
The funny thing is, I didn’t dismantle the ledge garden because we moved. I dismantled the ledge garden because I was also dismantling my relationship.
I don’t post a lot about my life on this blog. I started blogging almost a year ago because I felt like I was pestering my friends and family with photographs of my plants. I was like a mother emailing out too many photographs of her children too often. In efforts not to make my blog one of those horrible, uncomfortable TMI-type blogs, I’ve tried to keep it relatively focused: plants, gardening, container gardening, environmentalism, and urban gardening. I’m thinking about incorporating more about eating plants, but we’ll see.
Anyway, I digress, I don’t post a lot about my life on this blog, but losing my ledge garden, losing my relationship, losing my home, has been heartbreaking for me. This adventure here in Chicago, it isn’t an adventure away from my real life in New York anymore: It’s my real life-Midwestern life. My roots aren’t in New York anymore and I just feel so lost.
The ledge garden on the move from Brooklyn to Connecticut. (Taken with Instagram.)