Not your everyday conversation opener

After finding a volunteer seedling in the yard, I say to my wife: "Where would you like another palm tree?"

Ah, California!

And your taters got eyes

Me to my wife: "Honey, I was out in the container garden just now? And, um, did you intend to grow a big blue bucket full of swamp?"

Wanted: Viagra for my trees

Homeowners don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows. We have trees.

Trees are nature’s own neighborhood amenity, and I like having lots of them around for shade and beauty and visual diversity. I don’t even mind raking leaves in the fall, which is easy for me to say considering that all my current trees aren’t much taller than I am.

In previous houses, my family enjoyed the company of big old elms and towering cottonwoods and one fruitless mulberry that always dropped its yellow leaves all at once. Ka-whump.

We now live in a newish hilltop subdivision (though we don’t look newish) and the trees are undersized. While there are green belts around the edges of the neighborhood, the “street trees” (which sounds like a gang) and regular “yard trees” are young.

My yard trees are palm trees, and they came with the house. We’ve got a couple of fan palms, the type used to decorate public spaces, and they’re hardy as they can be. Practically maintenance-free. But these other ones, I think they’re called queen palms, with long feathery fronds? They are a large pain in my subtropical region. They’re puny and they’re ragtag and they whine and they lean over as if fatigued. (OK, they don’t actually whine. But they would if they could.)

These trees have become the botanical focus of my life. We pay a service to do the lawn. My wife fills the house with beautiful potted plants. My only plant-related job is to keep the palm trees upright. I usually fail.

The problem is that our soil is thick, rocky clay and the palm trees’ shallow root systems can’t penetrate. The palms are like eight-foot-tall celeries, standing on end, their little roots gripping the surface layer.

Poorly anchored and top-heavy, the palms regularly blow over. If left that way, they’ll croak. Pulled upright, they’ll keep right on living, but they can’t support themselves. (Much like teen-agers.)

I’ve used stakes and wire and ropes and staples and you-name-it to keep these trees pointed skyward. I’ll get them arranged, and the wind will change direction, and they all start leaning the other way. Then I’ll put stakes on the other side and tie them up, and get everything so snug, you could pluck that wire like a guitar. The next day, the wind will snap the wires or yank them loose, and all the trees will fall over on their bushy heads.

During storms, I stand at the patio windows, monitoring my wind-whipped trees. I’ve been known to run outside during lulls in rain to quickly adjust a tree. Or add another wire.

Eventually, the trees have so many wires and stakes, they resemble a tribe of tied-down Gullivers. My neighbors think I’m practicing tree bondage. I have to remove everything (while a bored teen-ager holds the tree up), and start over.

Saving the trees has become my strange hobby, and it raises certain questions: Am I crazy? Why don’t I replace the palms with something sturdier? Why not get a professional to stake the palms the right way or replant them? Doesn’t Thick Rocky Clay sound like a boxing movie?

All legitimate questions, but I can’t answer them now. I’ve got to go see which way the wind’s blowing.

A dirty business

I go into the bathroom and my wife's in there, dressed in her flannel pajamas with the cats on them. Plants sit around her. She's at the sink, dunking what looks like a plastic bag full of mud.

Me: Whatcha doing, hon?
Her: Warming this sphagnum moss.
Me: Oh.
Her: Why? What does it look like I'm doing?
Me: Never mind.

Room to grow

The latest "hot trend' in home design reflects perfectly our modern, pell-mell, multi-tasking, cell-phone-gabbing way of life.

Look at home magazines and real estate ads and you'll see how designers now construct every room with three or four uses in mind. For example, a kitchen will also be a laundry and an office and a hobby center and a conversation pit built around a fireplace. And there'll be a TV hidden in the cabinetry.

These ingenious designs make use of every square foot of space in the house by using the latest technology: stoves that are also refrigerators, washing machines that are also dryers, microwave ovens that are also X-ray machines, beds that fold into walls, desks with built-in bars. Every nook and cranny of every floor plan these days is crammed with a computer station and a telephone.

Such designs allow us to do many things at once, which is the way we live. We work in bed and eat in the den and phone from the kitchen and sleep in the office. And everyone else in the family is running around like crazy, trying to do everything at once, too. This is why, when you call your friends, you can always hear in the background a TV yapping and a toilet flushing and something sizzling on the stove.

Most of us don't live in houses specially designed with multiple uses in mind. Older homes have your standard arrangement of rooms and cabinets and electrical sockets, so we have to furnish and shape these rooms to fit our needs. This is how reclining chairs end up in breakfast nooks and toy boxes get tucked into bathroom corners. It's why the accent piece in every room is a tangle of gray computer cables.

Traffic patterns, comfort preferences and time conflicts dictate where people congregate and where we put our stuff and where we find quiet nooks where we can avoid the rest of the family. And that requires using rooms in ways that weren't intended.

Hasn't the kitchen always doubled as meeting hall? Whenever you host a party, doesn't everyone gather in the kitchen, noshing and yakking and leaning on counters and resting their elbows in sticky, days-old spills?

At our house, the laundry room doubles as an entrance, the living room has a desk in one end and a piano in the other, the foyer acts as closet space. The master bedroom is essentially a book-jammed library with a bed in it. The kids' rooms are toy storage facilities/disaster areas.
Then there's the "great room." This oversized room combines dining room, den, my home office, sunroom, gym and entertainment district into one cluttered, multi-use, feng-shui-free zone.
The room has big windows with a southern exposure, which means that this time of year, it also becomes a greenhouse. My wife likes houseplants, so there's always several flowering on the window sills. But this summer we fixed up our patio -- another Southwestern necessity -- and she went a little overboard at the nursery, until you couldn't see the patio for the trees.

When nights started getting cold, many of these plants needed to come indoors, so naturally she put them all in the sunniest room. My office/den/dining room now overflows with flora. The room currently has 29 plants, ranging from three inches to eight feet tall.

I'm not complaining. The plants are beautiful and she's arranged them nicely and they're pumping oxygen into our cooped-up indoor air. But they're crowding me a little.

My wife may have a green thumb, but I don't. I'm afraid to get near houseplants. Past experience has taught that if I water, move, touch or breathe on them, they'll expire within minutes. If I look at one too hard, it's the kiss of death.

With so many plants and potted trees around, I must skirt them when I walk and avoid them when I choose a place to sit and avert my eyes if one of them notices me. Because of this constant evasion, I move around the room like a nervous geek trying to do the samba.

And why shouldn't I be nervous? It's a jungle in here.

(Editor's note: In our current home, we have an actual office, separate from every other use. It's full of plants.)