Sunday, September 27, 2009

Bookworm: Hothouse Flowers and the 9 Plants of Desire

Flowers infiltrate lots of areas of my life.  A few years ago, I helped start the Baltimore Master Gardening Book Club. The book club was a way for Master Gardener’s to get together in the winter and keep learning-even when it was too cold to garden.

We’re entering our fourth year together. There are half a dozen regular members, and half a dozen others that come when they can. We have a great homemade meal filled with lots of local treats, we drink wine, we walk around gardens and we talk about gardening books.

MG Bookclub 1 

This month’s book was fiction. We don’t usually read fiction, but sometimes in the summer, when everyone is busy, we pick an easy read. So, the book: Hothouse Flowers and the 9 plants of Desire. You could read this one in a day.

According to the author, the 9 Plants of Desire are: Gloxinia, Mexican Cycad, Cacao, Moonflower, Sinsemilla, Mandrake, Lily of the Valley, Chicory and Datura. I hadn’t heard of most of them before I read the book.

The premise of the book is that if you collect all all of these plants plus the passion plant that has no name, you’ll have all of your wishes come true. Apparently from the book, collecting them is not so easy. This is an entertaining, easy read that I would recommend to anyone interested in flowers.

BTW, Lily of the Valley is the only one of the 9 Plants of Desire that we’ve used at LoCoFlo.  It’s a delicate white flower with great green leaves (below) We used it in a bouquet in the spring-but hope to use it more next year.

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