THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT

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LAST LAUGH

Too much oxygen can be dangerous thing.

By Jeff Taylor

W hen the first frost hit, joy and I were almost ready. The garden was completely mulched, the tomatoes were covered, the hoses were all properly stored, and I felt quite confident that Jack Frost could go sit on a zucchini.

Unfortunately we left a few house plants outdoors-umbrella trees, elephant-ear begonias, lacy-leafed ferns with long Latin names-on which the Ice Man took his revenge. Some of the plants are quite delicate-barely alive even in full bloom—and will grow only as a favor to people with green thumbs, like my wife.

"These guys will come back," Joy said, bringing the lifeless sticks inside. Back then, I wondered if she had even noticed how stupendously dead they were. Still, joy has proved that if a gardener is good enough, even death cannot kill them. It's not that the plants would have been missed. A solarium runs the full length of our kitchen, and Joy does not let it lie fallow. Our year-round plant population numbers in the high hundreds, reproducing like rabbits and cross-pollinating each other on window sills and shelves. Surrounded by green, we sit in front of the stove for six months, sipping hot chocolate and plotting new gardens.

Tarzan would feel at ease in our house. Ficus benjamina, the weeping fig that spent all summer on the porch, now grows high in a thicket around my desk, a migrating Birnam Wood like the one that bugged Macbeth. Dieffenbachia trees, notably one big-eared Amoena, read over my shoulder. Outside, all is deader than a frosted doorknob, but here in our winter greenhouse, the stove fire roars and crackles, happy for the extra oxygen.

Human brains feel much the same. Take mine, for instance. I may lurch through the summer in a haze of physical labor, but in winter my brain is soaked in oxygen. My life is immersed in great blocks of free time to think and think. And think. I call this phenomenon "The Greenhouse Effect:"