The Greenhouse Effect

Alternative medicine is in the news these days, welcomed as an elective for people who are uninsured, uninsurable, or discontented with the current bureaucracy of healing. Some of them, I'm told, are turning to Zen, others to transcendental meditation, faith healing, or spinal realignment. Many say they feel better now, pleased with their state of health and the signals they're sending to orthodoxy. I've joined the nonconformists and would like to suggest one more string to their bow—one more option that has received very little notice of late. Its cost is nominal, it offers broad coverage, and it imposes few unpleasant side effects.

Flowers.

Not cut flowers, let me make plain. Not hospital bouquets swooning in plastic vases or the exhalations of madonna lilies laid out in mortuary chapels. Not even exotic herbs older than Pharaoh.

No. What I have in mind are commonplace blooms, agreeable time out of mind to the eye and nose. Living plants hung in baskets, sprouting from window boxes or, for the sake of this communication, rooted in pots spread on benches from Sears Roebuck or, for the fortunate few, in greenhouses where their simple needs—light, heat, humidity, and ventilation—are automatically regulated around the clock.

I discovered greenhouses only recently when, 80 years on, I married a Virginian with one in her trousseau. As it happens, I brought a number of trifling infirmities to the altar: gimpy knees, poky hydraulics, and intrusions of the blues. Some of them persisted in spite of conscientious injections of vitamin B₁₂.

Having been reared in a desert land, I was a stranger to horticulture until one morning when I wandered into our greenhouse and met with a stunning surprise.

Companions. Magic and vitality rising from damp pebbles and green leaves.

The air smelled sweet, as it must have to Lazarus resurrected. It was rich, warm, soft, a blend of loam tinged with woodsmell of pine shelving and bamboo stakes. Every bloom was wreathed by its own scent—a dwarf evergreen, souvenir of Christmas; tuberose, carnation, geranium—bittersweet and pungent; pale orchids with violet throats smelling of far away. It was a parade of showoffs, flaunting themselves and crying, “Look at me!” with their high gloss, tenacious stems, dowdy frocks, jauntiness. An aloe with incongruous soft claws; clivia, a posy tucked in her bodice—all of them working in Trappist silence and attitudes of nonchalance. The scene changed every morning. If we could all do as well overnight!

Seed catalogues made it clear that I was in learned company. Every plant spoke Latin and almost as many, Greek. Their names were spiced with Amaranth (“unfading”), Gladiolus (“sword”), Philodendron (“love tree”). They had proud surnames—Wistar, Fuchs, Magnol—and musical nouns to define their anatomy: tepal, sepal, pompom, and petiole.

New friends are hard come by in the sunset years. Now I have dozens. We confer every morning, applauding enterprise and consoling wilt. I keep them posted on what's going on outside—the bear market, Gaza, the exploration of Mars. They've taught me new crafts—watering, pinching deadheads, and pruning, to name a few. For us this is a happy reciprocity; a two-way street as they say. New arrivals come along, and the spent depart unobtrusively, models of gracious farewell.

• Copyright ©2004 by the American College of Physicians