Boston Highlights

When we arrived at the station in Boston, my stomach growled and my head ached from whacking my head on the low overhang above the Megabus seats (something every Megabus passenger experiences at one time or another). Dave was sniffling from allergies and drowsy from napping in awkward positions over the sound of the archetypal crying infant on a bus. Yet in spite of waiting for an hour behind a sign on the sidewalk that read “Bostof,” we arrived at the intended destination.

Our trip was short – if it hadn't been, we would have been stuck in Boston through the duration of the hurricane. I certainly would not have complained.

Our first night, we went looking for some spectacular clam chowder. Quincy Market was all lit up like a Christmas tree. I described it to Dave as an endless food court with better food.

We found a little seafood restaurant called Boston Chowda and Dave ordered a bread bowl full of clam chowder. Dave decided it was the best clam chowder ever. Clam chowder makes me reminisce about a restaurant I used to go to with my Grandpa where bloated exotic fish blow kisses at you from behind an enormous glass tank as you slurp your soup.

A big sopping mess of chowder.

Dave and I resisted a multitude of candy coated brownies under glass cases and continued to the North End, the Italian neighborhood of Boston.

The main street was bustling, crowded with travelers, accordion players, and a clown twisting balloon animals. We were lucky to find a seat in a twenties-style café called Cafe Vittoria. Dave ordered a cappuccino with a frothy chocolate surface and I savored a square of tiramisu. Beyond the vintage signs and curling gold chairs a football game played in the background, confusing the ambience.

On our way back to the hotel that night we stopped to browse costumes and thrift shop clothes at the Garment District. The costumes were almost cleaned out but for a few mascot heads, fairy wings, and top hats. You could still get any size, shape, and color of fishnet tights you can imagine, but otherwise the Halloween hurricane had already come and gone. Savvy ladies dug through racks of vintage prom dresses and 70s skirts to construct Jackie O and Esmeralda costumes. Sequestered in a musty dressing room with a bulging stack of garments, I found the ideal sweater for a Cheshire cat costume. Halloween may have been derailed, but next year I’ll just need a pair of furry ears.

The second day was another food adventure. The Boston Vegetarian Food Festival deserved its own post, you can read about it here.

We walked to Boston Commons and the public garden. As we crossed Boston Commons we passed a man in a Dalmatian costume with three dogs in T-shirts. A one-man-band performed in the public garden, some amalgamation of a guitar, harmonica, drums set, trumpet, and a washboard. Dave fed the ducks in the pond some leftover cracker samples from the vegetarian fest, starting a feeding frenzy. We have more pictures of ducks eating crackers than anything else.

Dave photographed random strangers, perfecting the art of creeping around with a camera.

That night we went to Harvard Square for our next adventure. Our hotel was next to the MIT campus and as we walked around we assumed that every person our age must be someone brilliant studying quantum physics and neuroscience. It was much the same around Harvard, even with everyone dressed up as video game and Adventure Time characters.

We got a latte in the Harvard Coop, which turned out to be a poorly masked Starbucks within a poorly masked Barnes and Noble. In its defense, the coop really did contain real students quietly reading textbooks and looking rather tired.

We found a little shop with an impressive chocolate collection and I stumbled upon something I thought I would only see again in the Czech Republic – Mozart Kugeln. I bought two little pistachio truffles to be enjoyed on the ride home and reveled in Prague nostalgia.

I expected Harvard Square to be filled with shops and restaurants with names that allude to literature and the periodic table. In this I was not disappointed.

Science.

Dave and I had dinner in a bar called Grendel’s Den. Inside, Harvard students in costumes and funny hats drank beer in the reddish glow of the table lamps.

Dave had a steak with a Greek salad, prettily proportioned on the plate. I ordered Peruvian quinoa and got my first taste of chayote squash smothered in warm white cheese - easily my favorite meal in Boston.

Gardens in Glass Houses

During a trip to Ikea for a bedframe and a bath rug, I crossed paths with a tiny greenhouse called a “Socker.” Inspired by impulsive thoughts of upgrading Angelina’s terrarium, I tracked one down in the garden section. One month later, after puzzling together all of the essential parts of the apartment, I constructed the flimsy glass structure only to realize that it had no base. Nonetheless, I may be able to fill it with potted plants.

I have placed it on a Socker-sized ledge in front of the window above my sink, where the former tenants kept a large microwave. It will not do much good to put plants in it now as the window is obscured by wood planks. In the meantime I will have to be satisfied with wilted cilantro.

After a month of complaining about the lack of natural light in my apartment, I received a very useful Christmas gift from my mom: An Agrosun Dayspot 60 watt grow light kit. Now I can illuminate the shadowing corners where my plants will dwell and allow them to believe that this tiny lamp is the natural sun that its species evolved under.

Perhaps I should set the light up beside the Socker to create the ultimate underground gardening paradise. I have not plotted what plants to pot, but right now I’m leaning towards herbs. As much as I would enjoy a greenhouse full of flytraps, but I’d really like something I can cook with. For practical reasons, I will not attempt to grow melons.

The aforementioned wilted cilantro was obtained yesterday morning from the produce section an Italian grocery story. So far, I have found local grocery store herbs incredibly underwhelming. In Stop and Shop, I find the herbs shriveled on their death beds torpidly bleeding their last drops of chlorophyll.

At the Italian grocery store, I find the herbs drowning in torrential rains produced by a sprinkler mechanism installed above the shelves. Most grocery stores mist their leafy greens to make them shiny or whatever, but the Italian grocery store sprays theirs every other minute. Three times while I was standing in the produce section a recording of a summer thunder storm emitted from the speakers and a shower of water poured onto the produce.

I picked up the cilantro with two fingers and shook it for a minute or so. To create the same heavily-moistened effect, they might submerge the herbs in a swimming pool and have pool boys in swim trunks fish them out with nets upon customer request.

Cilantro is number one on my list of things to plant, followed shortly after by parsley.

Fit for a Fungus

Before I moved into the new apartment, I bought a rosemary bush that was shaped like a Christmas tree. I had every intention of stringing it up with lights and beads like a Christmas tree. Then December came around and I had a brown, spiky bush-skeleton shedding its needles on my windowsill. It wasn't as festive as I had hoped.

What went wrong?

My apartment is in a dusty basement. The last renters were eyeless mole-people. Prehistoric insects creep out of the cracks in the molding and the spaces where the pipes go through the ceiling, the wiggling ancestors of the centipede and mutant spiders that I catch in old ricotta cheese tubs and shake onto the driveway.

The windows are small, but at least there are windows. My landlords left wooden planks stacked in front of the kitchen windows to make me feel like I live in an 1850’s tenement, so very little natural light shines in. I have become a mole-person.

Yet I am not bereft of hope. Angelina, my pitcher plant, is thriving in the window beside this very desk, in full view of a creepy boarded-up garage. The little hairs that are springing up on her lips - her mustache, if you will - remind me of the tiny flesh-scraping hooks on a cat's tongue.

The day I moved in, I announced that I wanted to immediately procure a plant. Having a plant gives me the illusion that I am a responsible adult. “What could you possibly grow in here?” my mom asked.

“Mushrooms,” I declared.

I may have suggested mushrooms in jest, but now I’m completely serious. I stumbled upon this mushroom kit from Back to the Roots. This mushroom garden, which resembles a happy meal for gnomes, purportedly produces a sprawling mass of oyster mushrooms in ten days and produces at least two crops. The spore-filled soil inside of the happy meal box is made of recycled coffee grounds.

The process seems fool-proof, even for one prone to causing small forest fires in terrariums. You spray the coffee ground soil with the spritzer and mushrooms will grow. I may have found the ideal plant (or in this case, fungus) to grow in the dark.

Unnatural Happenings in My Backyard

I believe this is the quickest I’ve ever followed one post with another. I’m sitting cross-legged at my writing desk in a thunderstorm. My hand is cramping and I would really like a snack, but I feel compelled to relate the following story.

Yesterday I saw a creature pollinating our petunias that initially appeared to be a hummingbird, but on closer inspection resembled a bumblebee. It had transparent wings with a brown border and a long curly “nose” like a butterfly. Rather than black and white stripes it was yellow with one large, brown stripe. I suspected it to be the lovechild of a hummingbird and a bumblebee, the result of a tryst forbidden by Mother Nature.

Later, chasing a plastic back across the lawn, I stumbled upon a second alien creature in the shade of the woods. I saw a patch of completely white flowers. They looked like wilted rosebuds sucked dry by a vegetarian vampire, a cross between a crocus and a fungus.

After I recovered from the shock of all of the disparate organisms breeding in my yard, I wrote an e-mail to my friend, an authority on matters of plant and animal identification, asking what they were and if I should fear them.

Before she could respond, my curiosity lead me to Google. First, I searched, “Strange hummingbird and bumblebee like insect.” I found this page. The seemingly anomalous insect turned out to be a Snowberry Clearwing Hummingbird Moth. Then I searched “Strange white and transparent flower,” and I got this page. The plant is called Indian pipe. It has no chlorophyll and feeds off of the delicious fungus on the dead leaves. It is also known as Ice-Plant, Ghost-Plant, Corpse-Plant, Plant-of-Death, Ominous-White-Plant, and many other suitable titles.

Later, my friend responded to my e-mail and confirmed my search results. My conclusion is that Google is the boy scout of the twenty-first century.

One Month: Revival of Dead Plant Short-Lived, Indeed

I have been stalling the writing process for a few days to avoid showing what the terrarium actually looks like right now. Both plants were growing at an alarming rate and the leaf shapes looked perfectly alien. Right when I was getting excited and hoping to see some teeth soon, I left it outside in the sun to photosynthesize on Monday. Plants need to photosynthesize, right?

It appears that the recently resurrected plant has spontaneously combusted, whereas the other plant seems to have been seared by a small, contained forest fire. I watered it promptly and moved it back inside, vowing never to leave the terrarium outside in the sun while I go to work again. Next time I will leave it with a sitter.

I do not foresee a second resurrection in the future for my dearly departed carnivorous plant. I discovered a frosty white mold blanketing what is left of it tonight. If it returns now, it will be in the form of a fly-eating zombie.

I suppose I’ll have to find something else to write about if the other plant decomposes with it. The avocado pits are moldy. The strawberries are brown. I only have so much to say about these pleasantly striated onions.

Originally I planned to write about my adventures in Prague, but I have a while before the time comes to venture over the big blue puddle. What to do, what to do….

Supposedly Dead Plant Miraculously Revives Itself After Three Weeks

I went to take the weekly photographs of my budding carnivorous plant terrarium, and was bewildered to see new growth in the plant that I supposed was wilted and decomposing. I am delighted to inform the world that this deceptive plant has resurrected overnight. I am overjoyed.

The plant which has been unquestionably alive for the past three weeks is thriving, as usual, but I find myself wondering if it was a Venus flytrap all along. I could easily see the leaves turning into hungry little mouths in the near future.

I’ve been reading up on carnivorous plants. When one of my mother’s friends learned of my endeavors she sent me a magazine article from Smithsonian magazine about endangered Venus flytraps growing in the wilds of North and South Carolina. Colonial folks exported them to Europe as a curiosity, and the English named them “tipitiwitchets.”

Charles Darwin imported some Venus flytraps from the Carolinas and devotedly fed them cheese and egg whites. Thomas Jefferson, while living in France, sent away for some flytraps to impress the Parisian ladies. Empress Josephine kept them in her garden at Chateau Malmaison. The magazine attributes the plant’s name to a British botanist called John Ellis, while other sources attribute its name to a dirty, dirty man punning on female anatomy. (Anybody seen the movie Teeth?)

There is apparently a popular misconception that the American colonists were all amateur art historians and compared the structure of the leaf to the clam shell in the Birth of Venus by Botticelli. This gives me the idea to paint a beautiful naked women emerging from the open mouth of a Venus flytrap, hiding her shame. I offer this idea to anyone who wouldn’t destroy it as I would.

Bringing the stunted plant back to life was but one miracle. I planted a bean teepee over our septic tank, and the leaves around the poles have been sprouting and sprawling for quite some time. There is nothing remarkable about this. As of this morning, a dozen other bean plants sprouted under the bean tent. I’m not sure what to make of it. I didn’t plant any seeds there.

When I was little, I went to my friend Sara’s house wile she helped her mom plant a bean teepee. Sara informed me that the teepee would grow large enough for her family to camp in and they would spend the entire night picking beans off the walls and eating them.

Unfortunately, our industrial strawberry plant was not bestowed with miracles. It looks rather sickly after a week of rain and overcast. The corporate garden gnome hasn’t responded to my e-mails or phone calls. Why can’t we just plant real strawberries like normal people? I will not provide an image to support this observation, as I do not want to sully my blog with its rotting leaves. Instead, feast your eyes on these pleasantly striated sliced red onions.

One Week Later...

 
A week has passed since I inhumed my carnivorous plants. The pitcher plant shows some signs of life. It appears to be growing a small green fingernail and I can only hope that a hand follows. I’m come to terms with the possibility that the Venus flytrap may be dead. I trimmed the dry, blackened leaves from the stem this morning with a pair of kid scissors, hoping that the pale green stem underneath might contain a spark of life. The prospects are grim, since it didn’t have roots in the first place. I’ll give her another week.

To distract myself from the foreboding abode that my carnivorous terrarium has become, I photographed some of the other plant life occupying my kingdom.

I recently planted my mother’s QVC strawberry plant. It came complete with a bag of pre-grown dormant strawberry plants which I revived with water and the kiss of life. The kit came with Wonder Dirt or Magic Soil, or some sort of synthesized and patented soil which boasted organic components and water-retaining polymers for instant germination and optimum development. I felt skeptical about the soil and researched it extensively on the internet looking for some carcinogenic properties or frog imploding properties. Instead I just found this video for soil wafers. Click.

If anything, this just made me more doubtful. I never found any information besmirching the product, so I planted the industrial strawberries in the plastic soil anyway. I’m sure the plant will produce many lovely strawberries of identical circumference, each with six leaves and fifty-two little yellow seeds. At night, a gnome will come and inject each one with a syringe of Red 40.

When you were little, did you think that food dye was a natural component of fruits and vegetables?

We also got some bleeding hearts. They are my favorite. The name sounds like a song that Dashboard Confessional would write and they kind of look like cocoons full of metamorphosizing Barbie shoes at the moment, but later my devotion to them will make more sense.

Adventures in Carnivorous Planting

Over the past few months something in me has been craving the companionship of a carnivorous plant. Following this powerful and probably fleeting whim I purchased a Bug Biting® Plant Terrarium Set. The set included one dormant Venus Flytrap, one dormant pitcher plant, a bag of soil, a bag of moss, a smaller bag of soil, and a terrarium.

A Venus Flytrap is a leafy green mouth with sharp pointy teeth that lures insects in with a sweet fragrance and promises of sexual favors. Sometimes they sing songs that are so irresistible to a fly’s discerning tympanic membrane that the fly willingly submits to its own consumption. When the delicious insect rustles the sensitive hairs inside the mouth, the jaws snap shut like a bear trap. The fly is chewed, swallowed, and digested to produce second and third heads for this hydra-like creature.

The pitcher plant is a photosynthesizing pelican of death. It looks innocent on the outside. A passing insect cannot help but imagine it going to church and sitting in a pew full of calla lilies and daffodils (except for cobra lilies, which look something like the Loch Ness monster rearing her head from your garden.) Insects are attracted to its succulent puckering lips. Once a fly enters the mouth, the trapdoor closes and the fly whizzes down a waterslide into a pool of quicksand from which they can never escape.

The terrarium provides the plants with enough humidity to replicate the swampy conditions they have come to love, while simultaneously preventing the consumption of nearby houseplants.

Now that I had learned a bit about the plants, I felt ready to fill my terrarium with carnivorous flora. Step one of the planting process brought with it many confusion questions like Where are the plants? and Which side of the terrarium do I plant into? The directions indicated that the carnivorous plants were hibernating in the smaller bag of soil. In the smaller bag I found two clumps of dirt. Upon closer inspection, one clump of dirt had leaves and the other had roots. I could not tell which one was the pitcher and which one was the flytrap, but if I patiently wait long enough I suppose one will grow teeth. The plants looked nothing like the diagrams, nor did they resemble the familiar images provided by Crash Bandicoot.

I woke up my mother with a dormant carnivorous plant in either hand asking her which side was up. Thanks to the deterioration of her visual capacities, I was forced to make an educated guess. After filling what I thought was the base of the terrarium with a layer of soil and a layer of moss, I inserted the dormant beasts into the moss.

See the two dark clumps in the moss? Aren't they adorable?

After a long day of 90 degree weather and fierce sunshine there is little to indicate if I planted my babies upside-down.