I started a little garden at work, in the window.
Our office is on the ninth floor of one of those old-time office buildings that looks like an old-time office building - all brick and stone and evenly spaced windows with bold lentils. It’s a building that is easily drawn with a pencil, perfect for Superman to fly by or Spider-Man to swing from as he’s rushing uptown.
The building is about 100 years old, and while the interior has been updated a few times, no amount of industrial carpet and pastel paint can distract from it’s basic structure as a vertical collection of giant concrete rooms with pipes on the ceiling. However, its simple design includes the luxury of windowsills. Take that, new-fangled glass towers.
And it just so happens that, due to our elevated positioning at the southeast corner, our office gets plenty of sunlight.
At the beginning of Spring I ordered a seed starter kit, with little Alka-Seltzer™ tablets of soil that expand to five times their size in water. I forgot to order seeds, so I picked those up at Whole Foods.
I wish I could explain at this point the intelligent method I used to carefully choose what to grow in the office window, but it was during a groggy Saturday morning of grocery shopping, so I picked what I considered to be the prettiest of all the seed packages.
I did not read the word on the package because, again, I was at the grocery store, a place I am used to purchasing things by looking at the image on the package.
So.
The word on the package of seeds was “Wildflowers”.
I sprinkled the seeds into each little compartment and carefully poked them down into the soil a bit. My co-worker was a bit confused, as we were deep in conversation concerning an event being planned later that week when I just stood up and began casually gardening.
(This was, I now recognize, a bit odd, but my team is “used to me” at the office. I believe that’s how they describe it.)
After our meeting, I filled a plastic bottle from the sink down the hall and liberally watered the seed container. Then I placed in the window.
The office is by no means private, just cubicles in an open floor, and there were furrowed brows as folks passed by, but no-one commented.
For three days, there wasn’t much happening in the little planter. Then we had a long weekend, and when we got back, the plants were almost five inches tall.
I was so proud. I told my family all about it when I got home.
“What are you growing?” my wife asked.
“Wildflowers!” I said enthusiastically.
She paused before replying. I now recognize that as a sign that something was wrong with what I just said. Rather than review my statement, I now wait patiently for her reply, confident that her next words will point out whatever the problem was.
“The ones that grow next to the highway?”
I thought about it. I am not a botanist, but y’know, probably that was right.
“Yeah, probably.”
“Why are you growing wildflowers?”
Because they’re pretty, was the answer. Or rather, because the painting on the little envelope at Whole Foods was pretty.
“They’re pretty.” I said, with waning confidence.
“Aren’t you allergic to flowers? You have terrible allergies. Does anyone else have terrible allergies in the office? Did you ask everyone? And you know that those flowers are basically weeds and grow to, like, four feet tall, right?”
So, in order: Yes, I don’t know, no, and no I did not. However, my audible response was “Huh.”
Unimpressed with my brevity, she walked away.
I am not familiar with the agricultural rules of the city. One colleague from the next cubicle collection cheekily asked if we were cultivating cannibis, which I vehemently denied, which started a discussion about whether that was even illegal anymore, which sparked an investigation as to local law, which surprisingly leaves a great deal of those kinds of policies up to individual building management.
It’s not cannibis. But to be totally honest, I don’t know what it is. Wildflowers are not a specific thing, it turns out. I didn’t have a plan about the flowers, really. I just wanted to watch something grow.
We already have a plant in our other office window, one of those super hardy ones that is advertised as “impossible to kill”… survives anything, lives off any light available. It’s doing well. The wildflowers need more space and fresh soil and maybe a little bit of that MiracleGro™ stuff on them… they require a bit of care and attention.
This morning, I will pick up a nice little rectangular plastic pot at the Lot-Less discount store and transfer them over before the status meeting. I know they don’t belong there, trapped inside a giant stone tower, sunshine filtered through dusty windows, locked away from the fresh air… but honestly, neither do we.
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