Indoor gardener

Do you remember how I brought my beleagered strawberry pot of herbs indoors for the winter? It was a very sad, sad shade of its former self: it had fallen over on its side, and had subsequently crushed the tarragon and basil to death, and the thyme and oregano had been underwatered and were the colour of dead things. Ultimately, the oregano looked like it might stage a creeping return, but I cut back on all of the dead tarragon — which reduced it to a nub, basically — and resigned myself to starting over with new tarragon and thyme (and basil) next year.

Well, that was then. The basil is still dead (it is now living as a twig), but —


That little sprig of bright green? That's new-growth tarragon. It's healthy, too. I'd seen it before, but I had been worried that the lip of the pot would shade it too much. Apparently not, and now it's tall enough that it has all the sunlight it needs. And even better, those little sprigs of green around it? That's oregano, now fully recovered and colonising the top of the pot, because it's outgrowing its little side balcony:


And, finally, most surprising of all?


The thyme came back. A lot. (It had previously been the colour and texture of hay — like, 1 cm-high hay, but still — so this was a tremendous surprise. I didn't think there had been anything left to photosynthesize.)

This indoor/winter gardening thing is working out so much better than the whole outdoors thing, so obviously it wasn't my utter lack of conviction that was the problem; it was the fact that I took my lack of conviction outside. It wasn't me; it was the garden that was totally lame. That is now my story and I am totally sticking to it.