It is now crowded, but quietly and pleasantly so, in my living room.  I dragged in every plant from the balcony except the rose bush.   The rose won’t mind several nights of hard freeze.  Everybody else is more or less tropical and they would mind.  So it’s green stuff everywhere in here.   The parts of a new Ikea desk are everywhere too and  I had to put enough of it together to clear enough floor space to spread the tarp for the larger plants.  The lesser ones are all over my writing desk.  The Aloe Vera has a rosette of pointy, serrated blades almost a yard across:  not the perfect plant with which to adorn a writing desk in use.

It’s possible to swaddle up a balcony full of  plants well enough to survive a cold night or two, but that didn’t sound like a great idea this time.  We have the prospect of four nights in the 20’s.  And this weather came roaring in with north winds strong enough to rock the water in the swimming pool.  I’m pretty sure that my usual system of draping the plants with old sheets, secured by kitchen clips, would have (a) resulted in airborne sheets and (b) left me worrying in the middle on the night about welfare of the plants.

Houston has interesting weather.  My balcony plants get moved indoors about twice a year, one time (or more) in the winter for a long hard freeze, and some years another time (or so) in the summer when a hurricane  is on our doorstep and any pot plant left outdoors would turn into flying debris pummeling anything downwind.   They will shed a few leaves and possibly a whitefly or two, but I like my plants inside, where I can commune with them, much more than I like them being turned into weather-stricken salad.