Each New Leaf Is Another Chance To Turn To Turn It All Around
My love of plants began when I was young but too inexperienced to understand how to keep one alive. My first plant was a little pink Dracena Marginata that I purchased with my lunch money at a grocery store. I brought it home and immediately showered it with love and water. In the following days, my precious plant was starting to look more and more sad, so I tried to cheer it up with more water. In two short weeks my beautiful Dracena went from pink to yellow, so I had the great idea to give it ……more water. Needless to say, I loved it to death. I tried again with a few other plants but ultimately led them to the same demise. I finally threw in the towel and decided I had a black thumb.
It wasn’t until two decades later, when I moved to the concrete jungle, NYC, that my urge to have plants was reinvigorated. I was fortunate enough to have lived in Jimmy Hendrix’s cottage in the west village. In addition to sharing a wall with the Electric Lady Studio, the cottage featured an oversized sky-lit solarium as a living room that opened up into an outdoor patio garden. In that magical space, I was able to experiment with growing lot of different plants from fast-growing bamboo, delectable herbs used for dinners, flowering container gardens, sweet smelling vining plants that filled the air with perfume and even a 100 year old bonsai tree…. that I killed.
And let me tell you, I killed a lot of plants, but I learned a lot along the way. During the cold harsh weather of the east cost I had to bring in a lot of my plants indoors to winterize them and thus my love for houseplants grew. When I moved out to Williamsburg, Brooklyn I was bit by the bug and became a self-delcared house plant hoarder. I had so many plants that we had to eat dinner outside because the dining room table was covered with plants, plants, plants, and more plants. I was obsessed. Addicted to the plant life, I would devour videos on Summer Rayne Oaks, take weekend trips to Sprout and Chelsea Garden Center and daily stops by Crest Hardware and Rosehip Social on my commute home from work.
After 10 years of living in NYC, I decided to move back to my hometown in Southern California. In doing so, I had quenched my need to live in a jungle, and purged my more common plants to adopt a more minimalist lifestyle. I paired down my collection to a more manageable amount of statement pieces such as the Variegated Albo Monstera, Variegated Philodendron Golden Dragon, Variegated Anthurium Renaissance, among many other “Collector” plants that are now the staples of my plant shop in Tustin, California.
I would love to share my love of beautiful rare and exotic plants with others in the plant community, so please come by and chat chit with me about your plant journey. I’d love to meet you!
Keep growing!
jeaNNie
