Welcome Home!

It’s raining like it hasn’t rained in ages. Which is good, right? Except that my house is naked. For various reasons – one of them being a month-long trip to southern African – the much needed painting of the big, old scary house of mine had been postponed. Of course, as soon as the old paint was stripped off, that is when the rain started.

I fret and fidget, curse and pout, but nothing stops the rain.

So I resign myself to reading. One of the very nice things about my job is that the paper occasionally receives gardening and interior decorating books.

The big yellow book that arrived in my box the other day caught my attention.

“The Cannabible” (vol. 3) by Jason King is not something you see every day.

Imagine your nice coffee-table English rose book. In it you’ll find close-ups of beautifully shaped blooms in all colors, languid descriptions of scent and growing habits, as well as rose genealogy explained in graphs and tables.

Now replace “Graham Thomas” and “Constance Spry” with “Grape Mist” and “Petrolia Headstash” and you have a coffee table book about growing cannabis. As in, you know, marijuana.

There’s even a plant called Early Girl – but let me tell you this one is no tomato.

And I quote: “The sample pictured here was grown indoors organically in soil and produced thick, heady smoke with a lovely and complex aroma.” I beg your pardon?

This is not an endorsement – please don’t try this at home.

No, the book did not come with actual seeds or product samples.

Yes, pot growing and consumption is widely illegal in this country.

Just as it was in Denmark, in the mid-80s, when a distant relative found a feathery plant growing in his beautifully manicured yard.

It looked like nothing he’d ever seen before. Figuring it was some unusual specimen of perhaps a rare bamboo, he took good care of it all summer, and it grew to an impressive size – just in time for the annual garden tour in August.

This is the truth.

During the tour someone gently mentioned that the big “bamboo” was more of a cash crop than the owner expected.

The offending plant “disappeared” overnight never to be mentioned again.