growing joy

Growing things give me joy. Today I feel like rambling about plants. I do this often as almost daily in my job I am blown away by some new plant discovery. Nick has learned to put up with this new found love, but I think he now really enjoys my blabbering and shares the passion. We have a lovely Christmas Cactus in our home. What an incredible plant: all year it is a leggy, interesting green cactus with arms reaching out that look like a bunch of fat stick bugs. Then, as the days get shorter and the nights longer, the plant will bud and if you're lucky and cared for it right, blooms. Hence the name - it usually blooms around Christmas. The blossoms are beautiful hot pink flowers which seem to come out of no where. This year we were away for two weeks in early December and we got home to see one flower- the only flower of the year! Just having one sure made me appreciate it more (I even photographed it lots). I love this plant because it turns its winter freak out of less daylight and less water into something beautiful. It gets really stressed and as a result, flowers. So, inspired by the Christmas cactus, I am going to look for beauty and color in unexpected places this holiday season. Sounds good huh?

One more plant to talk about: the Bolivian Rainbow Pepper. The fully mature peppers on this ornamental pepper plant are bright red and their spiciness is just short of habenero a.k.a hot! In the maturation process the peppers go from purple to white to yellow to orange to red. You can have all of those colors on the plant at one time making it look like a Christmas tree with multi-colored lights. This year because of all of our traveling, this plant takes the place of a pine tree and warms my heart just the same. Those peppers also warm Nick's stir fry.. mm mm.

Other things making me happy this holiday season are triple-ginger cookies, gift giving, oranges and grapefruit, LED twinkle lights, cute Kleenex boxes and the incredible healing power of chicken broth.