Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Eleven O'Clock in My Pot Plants
A woman who has watered her geraniums at the same minute every night finds the plants wilting a full minute before her, as though keeping a better calendar.
- dated: "the grey weeks"
- narrator: "Winifred Ash, geranium keeper"
Thursday. The grey weeks suit the pelargoniums better than the dry ones, which I have said to everyone who will listen and some who will not. Eleven o'clock by the kitchen clock, every night, the long spout can, the tray under the east window first and then the shelf, oldest plant to newest, which is not superstition but only the order I have kept since Albert died and something in the house must be kept exact.
Saturday. I was late tonight. Not by much. The wireless held me with some nonsense about the shipping forecast and I looked up and saw the clock showed five past eleven, and I got up annoyed at myself. But when I came into the back room the soil was dark. All of it. Every pot on the tray already damp, as if I had been in there with the can and had forgotten the doing of it, which at my age is not impossible and I am not going to say is impossible.
Monday. I have tested it. I sat in the back room at half past ten with the lights off — you cannot investigate your own parlour with the lights blazing, it makes the room behave — and I waited for eleven. At nine minutes to eleven the plants began to lie down. Not dramatically, nothing sprung or aged about it, the leaves simply settled, the way a dog lies down when it hears the car turn into its own road. Then the clock showed eleven and I watered as usual and they sat up again in the dark, which I could hardly see but felt.
Wednesday. I asked Nora at the shop whether she had ever known a plant keep time. She said her mother's had, a fern that came out at half six whatever the winter, and her mother had died in the February and the fern had come out an hour early from then on and never recovered itself. I said that was the clock over the shop, not the fern. She went quiet and served the next woman.
Friday. I have moved my minute. The plants wilt at nine minutes to the hour now by the kitchen clock. I am not going to pretend I did not do it. I water at ten to and they are upright and grateful and the whole circuit is done by the room's own hour, and I will tell you straight, it is easier to keep their hour than to make them keep mine. It costs me a minute a night and I sleep better for it, and I do not care to write down why that should be.
Sunday. Last item and then I will stop troubling the book. This evening I took the clock out of the kitchen and set it in the back room on the shelf among them, one minute fast, so everything would answer. They paid it no attention whatever. They lay down at the usual minute and got up at the usual minute, exactly as if the clock were out amongst them for decorative purposes only, which I begin to think it is.
And the question I keep coming against, in the dark, on the quarter hour, is a small one but it gathers: every night I water them eleven o'clock, and every night they are ready a minute ahead to be watered — so on the night I was late, what was already in the soil they were ready for, and did I put it there with the can, or did it come to them ahead of both of us, already poured.