And after sleeping off exhaustion probably due in no small part to staying up late watching as much 'Felicity' as my eyeballs (and, sigh, heart!) can handle, I was feeling well enough that I decided I should do something more interesting with my day than laying in bed, drinking coffee and watching shit online. Plus 'Felicity' wasn't coming in the mail until later. Why not the Garfield Park Conservatory, perfect not only because it's free and only five minutes from my apartment but also because I could argue (again, a self-imposed challenge; see above) that this was a perfectly reasonable sick day activity--all that humidity and carbon dioxide would surely improve the health of an invalid like myself, as anyone who uses 19th century logic to justify their actions knows.
I wasn't really expecting to be inspired by the place, though...getting enough inspiration from my daily coffee experience at work, I was more interested in pretty flowers and becoming as warm as possible through no physical effort of my own. But even as I was pulling up to the huge glass building in the otherwise rundown neighborhood of Garfield Park, I saw the tops of the trees looming inside, contrasted against the barren landscape outdoors, and was caught off-guard by the beauty of it. Inside the place, you are enveloped by greenness; drawn into the funny names of the plants--the Boojum tree, for example, named from a Lewis Carroll poem--the weird shapes of the cacti, the horticultural information you never knew and will forget as soon as you've moved on (although you'll appreciate, man, you'll appreciate), the flowers, the cute couples on dates, the ponds where you can make a wish, and, oh yes, the chocolate tree.
I had been to the Conservatory once before, almost four years ago, and I remembered the basic layout of the place and most of what I've already described. I didn't recall, however, the Century Plant. "So named because it is said to bloom once a century," the plaque reads, "the Century Plant in fact blooms after a decade or two of growth. When it is ready, it sends up a single thirty foot stalk which produces an impressive blossom. So much energy is spent growing this flower that the plant dies shortly after. Side shoots growing around the base ensure a new generation of plants." Seriously? There is a plant that embodies major themes of everything from 'Charlotte's Web' to 'The Brothers Karamozov' to, well, Easter?! The English major in me is reeling--why didn't they bring this up in otherwise uninteresting bio classes?!--but I'll leave you to dissect its many meanings in the comments section. For now, it's enough to know that there is a tiny rainforest in the middle of this city, in the middle of this endless winter, where those of us for who are sick of the cold, seemingly dead world outside (if not actually made sick by it) can be reminded that even after the most beautiful and rare things have passed away, spring will come again...even if it feels like a century from now.
