Winter Guests

The summer is really, truly over. We know it not because of the pumpkins in every shop window or the screens piled by cellar doors awaiting cold-weather storage, but because The Star's house plant collection has tripled in the past week.

City friends leave African violets and geraniums on our doorstep every October the way babies used to be abandoned in the snow at churches, with pleading notes.

This is a much-loved plant, the notes say, carefully nurtured, fed, and watered, and free of infectious diseases. Now that the nights have turned cold, however, it can no longer remain outside.

Nor, apparently, can it go back to an overheated, under-humidified apartment house in which the temperature is centrally controlled, though never by anyone who cares a whit for geraniums.

No. What it needs is a Good Home for the winter, preferably one that has east and south-facing windows with broad, roomy ledges and a surfeit of surrogate plant-minders.

What was it the song said about the big city? It's a jungle out there, baby? It's a jungle here, too, baby, or will be until April anyway.