The geranium has outlived two landlords and one marriage.

The balcony is a metre and a half deep and faces east, so everything on it leans slightly towards Norway. I keep six pots out there. Five of them are an ongoing experiment. The sixth is a geranium, and it is not an experiment. It is a fact.

Provenance

It came from a cutting taken at my grandmother’s, carried here in a yoghurt pot on a train. I have repotted it perhaps twice. I have forgotten it for whole months. Last February it spent a week under snow and came out looking faintly annoyed.

Three potted plants on a weathered rooftop
The neighbours’ roof, which is doing much better than mine.

Notes to self

  • Water on Sundays, whether it deserves it or not.
  • Do not talk to it where the neighbours can hear.
  • Pinch out the dead heads. It does not care, but you will feel useful.
  • When a thing has lasted this long, stop trying to improve it.

Some living things just want you to stay out of their way, and I have come to find that very restful.

I think about it more than a person should. On bad weeks I go out there with a cup of something and look at it, this scrappy red thing that has no idea what year it is, flowering on regardless. It does not help exactly. But it does not make anything worse, and at my age that is a lot to ask of anyone.