Eleven Pots, After the Rain

It began at about eleven and it was the kind that arrives horizontally, which on a third-floor balcony means the railing is no protection at all and the wall is the only thing that is.

This morning: the four pots against the wall are perfect. The three on the railing have lost most of their soil over the edge and are sitting in what is now essentially a shallow bowl of root. The four in the middle are fine but have been beaten flat, and will stand up again by Thursday, as they always do.

I have been doing this for nine years and I still put pots on the railing every year. The reason is that the light is better there and I am prepared to lose them for it, which is a perfectly reasonable trade that I have never once admitted to making on purpose.

Two handfuls of soil back into each of the three. Nothing else. The instinct after rain is to intervene and the correct move is almost always to wait until Friday and see who is still trying.

It came from my mother's house in a plastic bag in 2017 and it has been in four pots since. It gets water when I remember and nothing else. No feeding. No pruning beyond what I pick to use.

Everything else on this balcony has been researched. I have looked up light requirements and drainage and the correct months, and I have killed several of them anyway, sometimes in spite of doing everything correctly and sometimes because of it.

I am not going to draw a lesson out of this, because the lesson people want to draw is that ignorance is better, and it isn't. Most of what I know has helped. But there is a real thing here about the difference between a plant you are managing and a plant that simply lives where you live, and only one of those two arrangements has lasted nine years.

It has never looked especially good. It has just never stopped.

Between about seven and seven fifteen. The same pot, the second from the left, which contains nothing more interesting than the others and is not nearer the railing.

He is not eating. He turns the top soil over with real method, takes nothing that I can see, and leaves. Then the next morning he does it again, to the same pot, having presumably learned nothing from the previous eleven attempts.

I have started leaving that pot slightly loose for him. I do not know what this makes me.

Nine years. Three bottles, because they go brittle eventually and crack near the handle you have cut into the side.

A proper can holds more, which on a balcony with eleven pots is not an advantage — it is four extra trips to the tap saved and one heavy object to store for the other twenty-three hours of the day.

The bottle also pours badly, which turns out to be the point. It comes out slow and uneven and I have to stand there and pay attention, and standing there paying attention is most of what watering actually is.

My daughter bought me a copper one in 2022. It is beautiful. It lives on the shelf in the front room where visitors can see it, and it has held water twice.