My indoor garden is my recovery garden, for we are both in recovery. We have had a rough couple of years, including hospital visits for various reasons, along with other setbacks. My plants were recently left in the dark with no water for two weeks, including some delicate bog plants. So, this is where I sit to do my mindfulness practices, alongside my little family of survivors, tending to them as carefully as I do myself while we heal and grow.
This is also where I sit when I contemplate tarot cards as fiction prompts, and where I’m doing elemental exploration of only the court cards for a collection of flash fiction. One part of the garden sits at my back, not always visible, but connected to all of the plants there. This week, the presence of my little predator was felt almost immediately. This week, I pulled the Princess of Pentacles.
As a page, she is earth of earth, the child of the court of pentacles. She studies the element they represent deeply, and contains all of the metaphors found within. Earth is the element of growth, prosperity, and the physical world. It is represented as coins in the tarot because that is what we exchange for goods and services. We earn our coin with our earthly skill, it is the element of both worldly pleasures and hard work. It is health and the physical body, and it is also death. Earth is the element of winter, when the living world goes to sleep by pulling itself within, to rise again in spring. It is associated with midnight, the time of day before the next day begins. The element of earth reminds us that life feeds on death, which feeds on life.
If the Greek goddess Demeter were seen as Mother Earth, the Queen of Pentacles, her daughter Persephone would be the page. This young maiden of spring, bright and full of love and life, is the Queen of the Underworld, the kidnapped and unwilling wife of Hades, lord of the realm of death. She may not like it, it is horribly unpleasant, that is certainly reflected in the myth, but life is married to death. It is so horrible that her mother grieves the world into a barren field of frozen white every winter. But, they are goddesses of nurturing and growth, their story is a cycle, every year she returns, and they recover.
When I sit in my recovery garden, at my back is a little corner of Persephone’s garden, my frog’s terrarium. Within it sits the apex predator of my little food web. I feed cuttings of my plants (and other things) to fancy looking pillbugs (Montenegro isopods), mealworms, and earthworms. Leftover plant trimmings are used as mulch, along with orchid bark and live moss.
Then my pretty little princess, my mock tomato frog Morty, gets to eat my well fed worms and bugs. Some escape into her terrarium, where they tend to the mosses and soil within. When I freshen her bedding, the soiled coir gets mixed with old pillbug and earthworm coir, and old potting soil (a little vermiculite is occasionally mixed in there). I run it through the oven to kill pathogens, and mix it all together with a bit of fertilizer safe for microbial health for future use. When it is used, it will be mulched with a pinch of the mulch in other pots. All of the plants have diverse communities of springtails, microbes, and other critters keeping the food web healthy and strong. It’s like permaculture, in miniature.
Morty’s tank is where it ends, and where it begins again. She lives in a cave, her garden is the entrance to the underworld. A while ago, I snuck into the yard of a murder house in Staten Island and pilfered a few landscaping stones. Those stones decorate the entrance to her cave, and I often joke that her cave is now haunted, it’s a terrorarium. I can’t help it. I’m drawn to memento mori, little reminders that life is not infinite, to make the time we are here all that much sweeter, and she is the perfect metaphor.
So, this week, when I sat down to contemplate the story for this card, I ended up inspired into finally doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time; collect more spooky terrarium decorations. I started with moss from Cherry Street.
Cherry Street, a shopping district and hip place to be, is named after the ladies of the saloons that flourished there in the heydays of Oklahoma’s Wild West. We revere our outlaws here, naming our sports teams after people who broke the law in the land runs, turning caves where outlaws hid out into tourist traps. Naturally Cherry Street is haunted. We need a reason to keep the beloved legends alive. I gathered moss from church parking lots (probably a likely spot for hauntings) and behind the occult book shop (definitely rumored to be haunted) for extra spookiness. It is stunningly green, and it makes Morty’s colors just pop.
All hail Morty, my golden eyed, autumn colored frog of death. I’ll be spending some time soon wandering through graveyards and other spooky places to decorate my little haunted garden. It seems a lovely way to spend the upcoming Halloween season. She certainly needs some fall colored leaves to blend into, though she never seemed to like the leaves as much as the coir. I’ll work something out.
By the way, if you also like the look of my little territorial crankypants sweetie, I went ahead and put some pics of her in my store, you can get prints :).
P.S. – Morty was named by a four year old trapped in a hotel room when Covid shut down all the playgrounds, and the only thing on TV she would watch was Rick and Morty (sigh). But I like to secretly pretend it’s short for Morticia.
Tippitiwichet 