Asparagus fern

I brought a plant to my office. I've had it a long time. I can't even remember when I got it. It used to stand among a number of other plants near my kitchen window, just to the left of the sink. There's a small bit of counter there that's fairly difficult to reach and make useful, so I put my plants there, where they could receive light from the west-facing window over the sink.

My sister used to ask if I really wanted plants there and why. This was when she was helping me get more organized than I usually am. She suggested that, since I had so little counter space to begin with, I should not waste any of it on a bunch of potted plants. When she asked why they were there, I said it's because that's where the light is.

I have one western window (in the kitchen) that gets the afternoon and evening sun. I have one eastern window (in the guest room) that gets very little sun because of trees outside. I have two sunny southern windows (in my bedroom and library), but when I tried to keep a plant in the bedroom my dog knocked over the stand it was on and the pot broke. That was not the first time my dog had caused the destruction of a flower pot. And my library was still in transition from being my dad's office to becoming a library, so I didn't spend much time in there and didn't have a place to put plants. (I have no northern windows, because that wall is underground.)

Then there's my living room. My "front room" as we often call it in Lynden, except my "front room" happens to face the back yard. It also has south-facing windows, but they get no sun, because the upstairs deck overhangs the lower deck there. That's nice for my container gardening on my deck; I have both a sunny, hot south-facing area, and a shady, cool area, so I can grow both sun-loving and shade-loving flowers. But my living room does not get enough sunlight to grow anything. I tried keeping some plants that require very little sun, but even they could not hack it.

Anyway, when my house was torn apart for water damage, my indoor potted plants got shuffled around the place as work progressed. I used to come to my house every Sunday afternoon and walk through to see what was happening. At first, I watered the plants wherever they sat. When they got covered by tarp, I gave up on them. Eventually the pots ended up outside on my deck. Two hardy plants survived this treatment. One was my asparagus fern and the other was a spider plant.

The asparagus fern actually throve once it spent the summer out in the shady side of the deck. This past week, we did go down to a freezing temperature one night. The asparagus fern (let's just call it "Gus") was sheltered enough by the overhanging deck that it did not die in the frost. But the next morning I took it with me to work, cleaned the pot off, pulled and cut out any remaining dead twigs, and set it with my other work plants on the bookcase that serves as a partition for my workspace.



It's a pretty purple pot, as you might see. The glass globe for watering was already in the pot all the whole time since it had been in the kitchen, so I kept it with. I washed it off and filled it up for this fresh start in a new space.

In the smaller, dark-to-light purple pot is a somewhat struggling succulent. It's getting a little spindly, but it hangs in there. And then is my African violet, which does very well in this space and blooms a lot. I believe I bought the African violet to put on my brother's grave at one one time and then brought it into work. The light source here is a skylight in the ceiling above, so the African violet (let's just call it "Vi") leaves reach upward to the light more and don't lie as flat as they usually would. But the beautiful dark purple blooms keep happening.

So, to make a short story long, that's how "Gus" came to live in my office.