Found that one on the web. It’s a plant.
I am, among other things, a great fan of weird plants (among my most treasured books is Fun with Growing Odd and Curious House Plants)—you might remember my detour into stapeliads during the mouse crisis. I admire sculptural structure more than flowers, so my taste runs to succulents and tillandsia.
Euphobia obesa.
Among the other bees recently in my bonnet, I decided to replace a few beloved plants that previous ignorance had killed—the baseball (or plaid) plant Euphorbia obesa ( pictured at left, too much sun),. A wispy air plant, Tillansia fuschii (too much handling). A lithops (watering. Not overwatering. Simply watering at all).
I did this shopping online. Which is a double pleasure, since (a) you can find them and (b) this is one market in which Amazon has no dirty paw-prints. But of course also a serious rabbit hole. I found myself among “collectible” and “rare” dealers/fanatics. With a little more discretionary cash (which I could have if I had a little less attraction to handbags—there, I confess it), I’d really be one of them.
“To my horror” because I associate collecting with women in purple capes who shop at craft stores for thimble display boxes; twitchy, basement-dwelling coin collectors, or twitchy Bond villains with orchid houses. But since I have the Dr. Evil pulse in my throat, I am already halfway to being the latter, I suppose. Destiny.
Lithops.
Some Tillandsia (mine).
One of the things that makes these plants so attractive to me is that I am rather bad at watering/remembering. And thus they thrive. But then I do something like put lithops (healthy ones at left) in the sun in summer: South African desert species, after all. No. They burn, they wither. Or in an act of uncharacteristic tenderness, I feed them—just this once—and they die a horrible death.
If you’re going to spend your vast fortune on collecting rare plants, it’s best to know how take care of them. Or maybe I don’t have the kind of vast fortune it would take to be a truly evil villain plant fanatic.
However, I have been recently successful at nurturing a number of them over the last years, so I have taken the plunge. Given my caretaking style and general trend of thought, you’d think that coming across a plant called “neglecta” would appeal by genus and by its pathetic name. But it is not very appealing (perhaps name is destiny).
But I do have a soft spot for pathetic. I have in mind as my next acquisition a boojum tree. Which is described by the authors of Odd and Curious as having “a pathetic appearance like a despairing sea creature.” What’s not to love?