The first Triffid Ranch show of 2012: ConDFW

In previous years, I’ve avoided attempting plant shows before April with good reason. In 2010 and 2011, for instance, we had such foul weather through February and March that I wasn’t worried about the plants freezing on their way to the event. Instead, I was more worried about my frozen corpse, still seat-belted into the van, being found in a drainage ditch halfway there. Last year, we had a solid week of sub-freezing weather in February, which may not sound like much to the denizens of higher latitudes. Out here, though, that’s begging for arriving at a show with a batch of sundews indistinguishable from a batch of frozen spinach.

However, my friend Amie Spengler nuhdzed and nudged at previous shows about ConDFW, a big literary science fiction convention that runs in Dallas in the middle of February, so the Czarina and I decided to take a chance this year. I still had sundews and bladderworts potted up in containers and ready to go from last November’s disastrous Friends of Fair Park show, and we figured “What could it hurt?” The weather coincided with our plans: lots of rain on Saturday, but otherwise exceptional weather both setting up and breaking down on Friday and Sunday. And who knew that carnivorous plants would be so popular among the Texas A&M student volunteers helping out here while preparing for Aggiecon?

Some folks came by just out of curiosity, or because they’d seen the Triffid Ranch booth at previous shows. Brad, though, came out specifically because he wanted carnivores. He left with a spoonleaf sundew (Drosera spatulata) and a Cape sundew (Drosera capensis) to go with the big grin on his face.

Beth is a very old friend, with my having first met her back during my science fiction writing days. She had a craving for green in February, too, as can be told.

Another happy sundew adopter.

And then there’s Tiffany from local gaming company Roll2Play. Tiffany’s main hobby at these shows is to gang up with the Czarina and leave me crying in shame and humiliation as they demonstrate that it is possible to kill at 30 paces with a sharp twist of the tongue. Thankfully for my fragile self-esteem, she took a small break from wielding her wit cannon, took pity on my runny nose and puffy eyes (it was from the flu, honest) and snatched up a medusa head (Euphorbia flanaganii) before anybody else got to see it.

A closer look at that medusa head. It wasn’t just that Tiffany loved the pot. She particularly loved the detritus within it, and threatened to kneecap anyone who messed with it. Time for me to hunt down a few more pots like this, I think.

And now it’s time to get ready for the next show of the season: All-Con 2012 in March. I’m even thinking of joining the costuming festivities after the main dealer’s room hours, with the obvious head explodey that goes with it. I can’t tell if 2012 is going to be a good year for shows, but if it isn’t, it won’t be from a lack of trying.

There’s always time for orchids

It’s always amazing what shows up at Gunter’s Orchids in February. (This is why the Czarina doesn’t worry about me when she goes out of town. Other wives take off on a week-long vacation in San Francisco and worry about their husbands doing things that require delousing, castration, or deportation afterward. Me, I go straight for the nurseries as soon as she’s on the plane, and usually in search of things to surprise her when she gets back. This Valentine’s Day, it was a beautiful Cattleya that she spotted as soon as she walked in the door.)

And should I mention that Gunter’s has a regular orchid gazing event in the middle of March that’s worth the trip to Dallas?

Have a Great Weekend

You know, this could be my theme song for the last decade.

No Sleep ’til ConDFW

It may be a little early in the season, but the first Triffid Ranch show of the year starts February 17 at ConDFW in Dallas. Naturally, this is just when my voice goes out (I’m at the point where I can follow up my list of symptoms by exclaiming “We call it…’The Aristocrats‘!”, because I’m now chugging DayQuil the way my forebears used to chug Maalox back in the Eighties), but we’re going to make this work. If you’re in town, stop by and say hello. I’ll be the albino guy in the back of the dealer’s room, squeaking like a raccoon.

Peering upon Hello Kitty hell

So far as I can tell, and as far as the chronicler of Hello Kitty Hell can attest, almost nothing in this universe is too foul, too sacrosanct, or too pure to be turned into a licensing tool for Sanrio’s Hello Kitty juggernaut. And yes, I mean the term “juggernaut” in its original sense, as in “something that demands blind devotion or merciless sacrifice.” Ar-15 rifles, age-inappropriate halloween costumes, pipes, sex toys…I’m waiting for Hello Kitty-branded Mars rovers and thermonuclear weapons next.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the Hello Kitty cult has infected gardening. And that’s fine. Really. Much like being one of the only businesses in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex that hasn’t received a “Best of Dallas” award from D magazine (mostly because the main qualification for being one of the 783 entrants in each and every category, as announced every month, is paying for the advertising space), the Triffid Ranch is and will always remain Sanrio-free. No Hello Kitty planters, no tomato stakes, no terraria, and no cow manure compost. With the last, that would be redundant.

However, I can understand the appeal of attaching one’s products to an existing brand and running with it, hoping that this translates to business for the company’s other products. I just need to find something a bit more wholesome than Hello Kitty. You don’t think that Peter Jackson would have any issues giving a license for a line of Meet the Feebles garden gnomes, do you?

Once more into the breach, once more

For those who didn’t know me in the black days known as “the Nineties,” I used to be a writer. Specifically, I used to write nonfiction for a plethora of science fiction magazines, culture zines, weekly newspapers, and other gathering posts for society’s detritus. After about 13 years of little recognition and less pay, I came to my senses and quit nearly a decade ago. I refer to my two temporary returns to standard writing as “relapses”, and it’s because of writing that I have sympathy and offer support for recovering heroin addicts. Writing is a nasty, foul, vile little business, and the only reasons I can see for wanting to go back to dealing with science fiction publishing are either addiction to the subject matter or a level of masochism that usually entails bunny suits, overflowing toilets, and six-foot sandstone strap-ons lubed with habanero peppers. (Now’s about the time I’m told by friends “Tell us what you really think.” That’s when I tell them about how the only way I got paid for one of those relapses was by threatening to out the personal E-mail addresses and phone numbers of every executive at SyFy if I didn’t receive my check, and they understand why I’d sooner get a hot Clorox enema than have to deal with that again.)

Strangely enough, though, I don’t have that level of hatred toward writing about horticulture. I have no delusions of reaching the heights of a Gertrude Jeckyll or even a Neil Sperry in garden writing. For me, it’s pure relaxation, spiced with a thrill coming from sharing new wonders with friends. And then there’s the cross-pollination with people in other endeavors: I haven’t found the right opportunity for another article about plants for Reptiles magazine, but the response to last year’s article on carnivorous plants in the vivarium gives me an itch to try this again.

Then there’s the newest addiction: dark gardening. And so now I start as the new gardening columnist for Carpe Nocturne magazine, starting with the Spring 2012 issue. Arioch, Issek, and Nyarlathotep help us all.

Fear and Loathing in Bronchitis

The period between the end of January and the end of March is one of my favorites, and if you can’t hear the sarcasm dripping off every last word, it’s because you don’t have your ear close enough to the computer screen. One of the absolutes about weather in Texas has been “If you don’t like the weather, hang around for five minutes, and it’ll change,” and this year has been a beaut. One day, clear, sunny, and ridiculously dry. Ten hours later, below freezing, rainy, and a relative humidity perfectly suited for growing mushrooms. Mix and match these traits and add a few more (dust storm, snow, asteroid strikes), and this pretty much sums up the end of winter in North Texas. Start out the day in heavy coat and boots, and be prepared for shorts and sandals by the time you get off work.

For me, if the weather would stay consistent, I’d be fine, and I’d settle for shaving the insides of my lungs every few hours to keep the moss under control. Instead, almost without fail, having to go back and forth from indoors to outdoors leads to a visit from my old friend, bronchitis. Some visits, he brings his girlfriend viral pneumonia, and they spend the next few days trashing the environs before they finally get bored and move on. I regularly joke that “any idiot can cough up blood, but coughing up urine takes talent,” and that’s actually a fair assessment: I know I’m getting better when the end of a five-minute coughing fit brings up a nice tracery of arterial blood within the usual five kilos of yellow-green phlegm in the bathroom sink.

In one way, I can actually thank bronchitis for the reason why I have no interest whatsoever in mind-altering substances. I used to have a much worse time of things when I was a kid, and I was actually surprised to discover in first grade that my schoolmates didn’t have full near-death experiences when they were ill. (The first time I had actual pneumonia, I didn’t believe I was sick, because I wasn’t looking down on myself lying on the couch every few minutes.) I don’t need exotic pharmaceuticals to see floating Nixon heads flying off the television and intoning “Sacrifice…sacrifice…sacrifice…”, because I get worse things than that simply by closing my eyes and trying to sleep. If anything, I overdose on NyQuil just to keep the fever dreams under control. It’s bad for my kidneys and liver, but it beats watching dead babies crawling on the ceiling.

If there’s any good that comes out of all of this, it’s that April is going to be spectacular. After the amount of epoxy putty currently forming in my lungs, it had better be.