My mother grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, and I used to spend 6 weeks out there every summer as a kid. With that agricultural background, we always had houseplants, and I suppose it "rubbed off" on me.
While at Ga Tech, I bought a few plants for the dorm or apartment and got more involved with growing them, so I volunteered my time at the public greenhouses in Piedmont Park (now the Atlanta Botanical Gardens), pruning, cleaning up, etc., and amassed a huge collection of tropicals via divisions.
After a year or so, I was asked to help water in the adjacent GH, which was full of these rally funny looking plants that occasionally had big, floofy, pink, white or purple flowers (standard catts). Some time later I was given one as payment.
I tortured the thing - the classic alternating "root rot/desiccation" treatment newbies are so good at - for two years before I killed it, and I DON'T KILL PLANTS!!!!* Heck students and faculty would give me their ailing houseplants to revive.
That's when I got determined to actually start learning how to grow them, and the rest is history.
* I now know, from orchid growing, that I'm actually really good at killing plants, but that's OK, as you're not an orchid growing "expert" until you've killed your weight in them!
|