A Government department in Canberra can’t trust its staff to water the office plants so it pays thousands of dollars for their hire and maintenance.
We’ve had some incidents with our office plants. Once the secretaries gave me a nasty-looking tropical exotic.
It was when it began swallowing flies and snatching at my sandwiches that I became uneasy.
I heard two office girls talking about it. One said: “What’s eating him now?”
The other said: “Nothing, but give it time.”
The next plant had big fronds and the girls lavished such attention on it. I decided this was time-consuming so I bade it a frond farewell.
Yet I suppose it was nice to have a bit of greenery which would cushion me against the ravages of the day. But they wouldn’t let me have any Angels Wings. They know how I like a flutter.
But they tried to find something to suit me.
“How do you think an aspidistra would go in Fatchen’s office?” the secretary asked the boss.
“Why not,” he said? “He has a lovely big pot.”
He, of course, has a rubber plant so that he can bounce the staff
But it was the cactus plant that caused a pecul far change in me.
“Mornin’ gal,” I drawled to the typist, “I just been ridin’ the range and headin for the last round- up. It’s high noon, honey, and raindrops keep fallin’ on my haid. Kiss me, Mary Lou, and I’ll stampede for the saloon and a shake and burger.”
A little later, I had my shirt off and my face streaked with Biro and I danced around the cactus, going, “Hai, hai, hai.”
Then a squaw appeared.
She said, “When you can tear yourself away, Geronimo, the chief’s on the warpath.”
So they tried me with one of those miniature Japanese trees, the sort that makes you leap on your desk, shrieking “Bonsai”
But, crush my kimono, the tree actually soothed me.
Then the tea lady arrived and performed her centuries-old ceremony, dipping the ancient tea bag for the traditional half-second in the lukewarm water.
The final, beautiful touch of delicately slopping the coffee biscuit had all the old-world fragility of colourful Nippon about it.
And yet the office pot plants are a mere scattering compared with the massed greenery of my wife’s collection. There is her pot-plant stadium alongside which Football Park looks like a children’s playground. One can stand in it during the heat of day and hear the chattering of strange birds. Well, she’s always showing off to her friends.
However when she goes away for a weekend and says: “Now water the pot plants” It’s enough to pale the nail of any non-green-finger.
One drips and splashes from room to room while the aspidistras gulp and the potted pigface slurps and dribbles.
Then the phone rings and I feel for it through the trailing tentacles of some indoor creeper. No wonder I get my vines crossed:
“Are you watering the pot plants?”
How that sentence must have rattled around the world, chilling countless men in soggy slippers, patrolling through the sleepless, saturated nights, doing a watering can-can through the shadehouse and the fernery, tying ribbons in the maidenhair.
Do you know why the Murray has a sandbar gag across its mouth? Because all the water has gone to pot.
Oh, and Mr. Tonkin, do bring foreign investors to our place. We have more plant than GMH.
Max Fatchen