plants: they grow up fast, you know.

transporting my jungle. they were so brave!

our path through seoul rush hour traffic while piled high with plants and landscape paraphernalia.

i was sitting shotgun in a 1.5 ton truck stacked high with trees, three huge custom-made planter boxes and over 1 million cubic centimeters of peat and fake dirt as my driver and i negotiated friday rush hour traffic while listening to a korean version of billy joel's "new york state of mind". maybe it was just the absurdity of trying to turn my seoul apartment's terrace into a jungle, but the sky looked especially blue and as we drove across the han river, towards namsan and then under it, seoul looked crisp and beautiful.

a month or so later, for the most part my babies are doing well. turns out the lopsided ratio of parso (fake dirt) to peat moss means there's nothing to hold water, which makes for some very thirsty petunias and buxus koreana (korean boxwoods). nevertheless my pine is a big show off and one of my maples surprised me with a rare mid-summer explosion of flaming red foliage. let's hope he isn't too pooped come fall. my other maple with the beautiful twisting trunk worries me, but if there's a god (which there isn't of course), she'll pull through.

update 4/16/2008: holy ghost, she dead!