A Chilli Plant Has Decided To Live

It has been a stick since June. Two leaves, both yellow, on a stem about a foot high, in a pot I had already mentally reassigned to something else.

I did not do anything. That is what I want to be accurate about, because the temptation now is to construct a story where some intervention worked. There was no intervention. I stopped feeding it in July on the grounds that feeding a dying plant is mostly for the gardener, and after that it got water and nothing else.

Four leaves. At the base, not at the top, which apparently is the good place for them to appear — it means it is rebuilding rather than reaching.

Nine years of this balcony and the thing I am still worst at is waiting. Every plant I have lost, I have lost by doing something. Not one of them died while I was ignoring it, and I have never been able to make that knowledge change my behaviour in the moment when a plant looks bad.

She has moved in about six weeks ago and has a balcony with nothing on it and very good afternoon light, which I have been quietly envious of since the day she arrived.

She asked on Wednesday. And the honest answer is that a cutting taken now, going into the last of the rain, in a pot with no established anything, is a cutting that will probably rot rather than root — and I could hear how that sounded as I said it, which was like a person protecting a plant.

So I said give me until October, and then I did the thing I should have done first, which was give her one of the pots outright. The small one with the two of them in it. She has better light than I do and it will do better over there than it has here.

She sent a photograph of it on her railing on Thursday morning. On the railing. I did not say anything about the railing.

Left to right along the wall, then the three on the railing, then the two by the door last because they are in shade and want less.

Nine years of this. It takes about fifteen minutes and I do not think about any of it, which is the whole value of the arrangement — it is the only fifteen minutes of my day that runs without me.

In June I started at the door end for no reason I can reconstruct, and I finished, and put the bottle down, and two pots against the wall had not been touched. I only noticed in the evening. The order was not a preference; it was the entire memory system, and running it backwards deleted it.

I have thought about this a great deal since, because I am fifty-eight and my mother at seventy-nine had a similar arrangement with a similar balcony and I used to find it slightly rigid. I understand it perfectly now. It is not rigidity. It is that a sequence you do not have to hold in your head is a sequence that costs you nothing, and at some point you start noticing what things cost.