A Prairie Home Companion

If you've been to our house in the last two years you'd have seen our succulents. They started as one scraggly bushel of grey-purple desert roses, super creepy and crawly. Since they've come to live with us they've multiplied and thrived like no other plant in our garden.

That is not to say that this thing has been babied. It's in prime punching zone. Johnny has stumbled and grazed it, Barack has knocked it off the shelf. After each assault I pick up the broken buds and put them in various pots full of dirt. This one is my cactus graveyards:

They started as little leaves or tiny flowers and grew with the occasional lazy hand scooping around in their dirt.

Their origin story? Johnny remembers being a little boy in Georgia, swinging on a tiny seat suspended from his Grandfather's workshop. His father worked for the railroad and brought home several pieces of railroad storage containers. His grandfather turned these storage boxes into pots that he suspended from ropes to the workshop roof. He planted succulents for Johnny's Grandmother. These plants grew from their hanging plant holders for two decades before I came along and said: "Ooo. Those are so pretty!" And Johnny's mother, Gloria, passed one along to me!

We've decided we want to begin separating off some of the larger flowers and planting them individually. Over the next ten months we hope to have upwards of 40 and we will use them as the primary floral arrangements on the table centerpieces.

I plan to keep my eye out for decorative pots and plant holders. My collection of antique bottles has already grown. I'm looking for tiny shabby chic pots, victorian looking teacups and pots, the famous ivory granny boot plant holder, tin buckets, etc.

We will pot all of these and offer them up to guests as goodbye gifts when the reception ends.

We know we won't be able to take them with us all the way to Pittsburgh. It could very well be the end of them. It would be so incredible to know that they're going on, living various lives and always carrying a memory of our wedding and our life in this house together.