Hestia mourns the passing of Wilfred, RIP

Sonshine is terrible for blagging a lift home from school. He stands next to his wee friend (the one who eats duck) and looks balefully at friend's mother until she offers him a lift home.

A couple of weeks ago he emerged from the gleaming silver 4 x 4 clutching a family-sized yoghurt pot, from which a slender green plant clung nervously to a kebab stick.

'This,' he announced to me with all the awe and gravitas of a man introducing the Brazillian lap-dancing girlfried to his mother, 'is Wilfred.'

I looked at Wilfred's spindly green neck with much the same concern as aforementioned mother might regard a lap-dancing girlfriend. 'He's very...slender...for such a tall plant, isn't he?'

In a flurry of floppy leaves, Sonshine thrust the yoghurt pot into my hands: 'You need to look after him.'

Now, some of you may remember that I'm not hellish good with plants (see: greenhouse massacre) and I was pretty sure that some hideous fate lay in store for poor Wilfred at my hands.


To minimise the potential for horticultural disaster, we agreed that he should live out in the porch beside my Jade plant (thriving) and my String of Hearts (absolutely fecking indistructible - needs a blog posting of its own).

There Wilfred has lived quite happily for a couple of weeks....

....until this evening.

Sonshine decided that Wilfred needed watering (curse you Toby Gardener's World goblin) and as I watched Alice planting up some rather garish Asters, Sonthine tootled off to do his thing.

He was gone a suspiciously long time and just as Gardeners World was finishing, he came into the lounge and threw himself dramatically onto the sofa.  He is his mother's son afterall.

'Wilfred's had a bit of an accident,' he gulped.

In Hestia's house, accidents involving plants usually involve secateurs, broken crockery or at the very least some inadvertent stabbing.

'How serious is it?' I asked (in manner of Greys Anatomy doctor, rushing to the kitchen.

'Not too bad,' said Sonshine.

Not too bad?

Perhaps in some civilisations decapitation is 'not too bad.'  Certainly, for a sunflower named Wilfred, I'd say it's pretty damned terminal.

I looked at Sonshine's wee face and promptly set-to, trying emergency remedial re-capitation.

First you need sellotape.  We held the broken edges together and I basically wound about half a reel of sellotape around Wilfred's severed stem, creating a fairly solid join.  Then I snipped off the twine holding the kebab stick 'support'.  And those inverted commas ARE required.

Half a bamboo cane was pressed into Wilfred's organic soil and several sections of green twine snipped to length to tie him up securely.  By the time I was finished, Dr McDreamy would have been proud.

Has the emergency surgery worked?

I'll keep you posted......