Orchid

‘Orchid’ was the very first prompt in our Keep Writing Challenge, which began on 24 March, 2020. We had 300 words to work with, which given my relationship with these fickle pot plants, seemed far too many. So from my disastrous past came this. I promised my friend Holly Hutchinson-Keip I would post this, after seeing a picture of her prolific outdoor orchid, thriving without a care in the world.

The gift of an orchid was one which she considered as the most anxiety inducing of floral gestures.  She had been the unenthusiastic and reluctant recipient of many varieties of plants in her time, delicate petalled, fluted, pendulous, leafy and ferny, all as unreceptive as the next to her attempts at nurturing. She had consulted, Googled and researched every horticultural expert on the subject to no avail and so assiduously avoided them wherever possible.

But Paul thought she needed more greenery in her home. He knew she disliked cut flowers but insisted on always bringing her a pot plant each time he visited. It was something that she both loved and hated about him. His thoughtfulness was a source of such delight to her, but he seemed oblivious to the number of plants that now bedecked her small London apartment.

The flat was beginning to resemble Kew Gardens. The plants thrived to differing degrees. Those that had already wilted since his botanical onslaught began, she had hidden behind the more hardy, Triffid like ones. The latter were resisting succumbing to her over or under watering, too much or too little exposure to the sun that streamed into her sitting room, and her other general inadequacies as far as taking care of living things was concerned.   

She regretted her incapacity truly to love – she had always felt her heart was too cold to admit others, whether it was a plant, a pet – even puppies failed to elicit the same requisite mushy emotions as in others – or a person.

The complexities of the orchid required too much of her, and she saw now that so did Paul.

The glorious pink phalaenopsis would soon become a stick in a bowl, barren of petals or leaves, a symbol of her desolation.