January windowsill
We had another nearly three-quarters of an inch of rain last night–it never bothered with the threatened frost: the temperature just headed straight up and then the precepitory faction started sheeting–and after hanging around most of the morning because the weather report said it was supposed to clear up, hellhounds and I went out in what we hoped was at least a lull. I suppose it was a lull. It still came on to sheet again before we made it back to the car again, although this time it was attractively mixed with hail.
I really need flowers in January.
So this was the chief windowsill before I got the sitting-room jungle organised. I have four plant-usable windowsills, two in the kitchen and two in the sitting-room, but this is Pack Leader. Among other things it’s the one I stare at the most: that’s the kitchen table at which I sit reading the six or twenty months’ accumulation of magazines, or writing blog entries.* The one over the sink is unfortunately cluttered up with riffraff like bottles of washing up liquid and non-scratch cream cleaner and a small china George V and May pitcher containing rubber bands, which means less room for plants, and I’m usually staring over their heads out into the garden at everything I could be doing if I weren’t washing up. Although staring has become difficult lately since the abutilon which lives on this sill and which is, as are so many, waiting for spring, is about six feet in all directions and I have all its various stems curled up like hawsers on a (vertical) deck**, with the result that that windowsill*** is kind of the sub jungle.
What I Have Learnt about Wintering Over: chocolate cosmos hate central heating. Really, really, really hate it. I think I’ve only lost one; the others look like they’re recovering under the grow light. But here you see the osteospermums saying, oh? Hmm? Okay? And putting out flower buds in a slightly confused way.
Here’s Pack Leader Sill now, with the cosmos and the osteospermums (and the inadvertent snapdragons and the fuschias and whatever) recovering some of their poise under the grow light†. 
When in doubt, more hyacinths. Also daffodils. And rhodos. Isn’t that pink-edged white ruffly one darling? I just hope it survives to be repotted and grow on: you never know with florist’s as it were occasional plants, like occasional tables, as opposed to nursery ones, which are assumed (sometimes incorrectly) to have a will to live–instead of collapsing after a few weeks like cut flowers that only happen to have roots.
But, as I say, in January I need flowers.
However, please note geranium. 
Now she’s the sister of the two outdoors which are fighting for life. Last summer they were the lucky ones, in big pots with lots of root room. The mystery, however, is that while she should be an apple-blossom geranium, which is to say intensely double and somewhat resembling little pink roses††, for life on a windowsill in winter, she’s gone single. Go figure.
Next summer, supposing enough of the jungle survives to be carried outdoors to make all my neighbours’ tiny new cuttings and plant plugs look sick, I am going to be peering narrowly at a lot more of my tender perennials and thinking, okay, would you thrive in a pot small enough to bring indoors††† next winter?
* * *
* The wiring dangling down behind the chair on the left plugs into the tiny old laptop that lives in one of the drawers in the tallboy that is just outside the picture frame. The tallboy contains mostly shirts, jeans, etc^ . . . and one computer.
^ It also has two small Miscellaneous Drawers but I think I’ll save them for some other evening when I’ve been working late on PEGASUS and am a trifle brain-blasted.
** I have to allow it to uncurl on freezing nights, so it doesn’t get frostbite through contact with the window glass: it then resists me the next morning as I want to be able to get to the kettle and the tea caddy again.
*** With the assistance of my Funny Birthday Present Plant
† Life is short, and I didn’t bother to clear off the twenty months’ collection of magazines for the photo this time.
†† Yes, of course this is why apple-blossom geraniums appealed to me in the first place. But in January single is completely charming.
††† Indoors in the insulated summerhouse at Third House, mind you.
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.