For this week’s episode of our Plant People series, I took a short walk down the road from where I live in Hastings, to have an informal chat with Josef. Josef is a Barber, which proved beneficial as I needed to get my head shaved, but that wasn’t the main reason for my visit. Every time I walk past his barbershop I stop to admire the impressive houseplants in the window. So often I walk past high street shops and am appalled at the sad state of neglect their plants are in, but not in this shop . They’re robust and healthy, and I can tell they’re cared for. It was an opportunity too good to miss.
Josef runs the barber shop with his brother. When I entered, it was a sweltering hot early summer afternoon. They were sitting in the shade out the back, catching some cool in the quiet. Josef greeted me with openness and ease, beaming at me when I asked if I could chat with him about the plants in his shop. Starting in a pot growing next to the till and trailing up the wall and over his head was a single Pothos stem, a new shoot at its tip hinting at its triffid-like growth. Would it make it out the door, I wondered.
I asked Josef why he has plants in his shop. His answer shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. I thought he’d say to make the place beautiful. I thought he’d say to attract customers, given there’s up to ten other barber shops along the same road and competition must be tough. Instead, his face lit up and he said, ‘They give you happiness first. Gardening always gives happiness. Flowers open your heart and help you breathe, by giving you oxygen.’ I liked this man even more. He continued to extol the virtues of the natural world and became so animated that I was worried he’d veer off course and I’d end up with a mohawk. ‘How do I talk about flowers?’ he continued. I wasn’t quite sure if he’d become lost for words or if there was a language barrier between us, but I helped him out by offering one word: joy. ‘Yes’ he said, ‘joy!’
It turns out the plants that decorate the brothers’ shop are for their pleasure first. If they bring joy to their customers, so be it. As keen growers in their home environments, I got the impression that surrounding themselves with plants at work made them feel that little more connected to their roots. Josef and his brother come from a family of farmers. Their love of growing was nurtured in them strongly by their mother. It wasn’t only flowers that they grew though. Josef and his brother come from Iraq, and he shared that, because of war and the scarcity of resources like food, it became necessary for them to grow as much as they could themselves.
When I asked about Josef’s garden at home he stopped shaving my head and whipped out his phone, eager to show me his garden in the north of Iraq. This includes a terrace, punctuated with fruit trees and bordered by flowerbeds, overlooking grapevines growing on a hill opposite. The conditions looked dry and harsh to me. I asked him if he has a garden where he lives in the UK and how he finds it here in comparison. He immediately flicked through to a video of a shrub rose, with multiple different cultivars grafted to a single rootstock. The roses ranged in colour from deep burgundy to a painterly variegation combining cerise and pale yellow. It wasn’t to my taste but it was unusual and impressive and a great talking point! I could tell he was proud of it and how he’s adapted from gardening in the arid conditions of Iraq to the lush softness of England.
Josef made me chuckle when he said there was pretty much no difference between gardening in the two countries as long as you have a greenhouse here. Well, indeed! He did admit that a lot of the plants he grows indoors as houseplants here in the UK he could grow outdoors in Iraq, which has been a bit of a learning curve for him. When I asked how he cares for them, to my great delight, the first thing Josef said was, ‘I talk to them [insert chuckle]. ‘I offer them compliments like “Hello beautiful” while I clean their leaves.’ Now we’re getting to the good stuff, I thought. I absolutely love getting insight into the ways in which people tend to their plants, and Josef’s care regime did not disappoint:
Sweet talking
Cleaning the leaves with water
Feeding with water that contains the starch from washed rice (having looked this up on the big G, apparently the starches in rice water feed beneficial bacteria in the soil and contain traces of micro-traces of nutrients, although Josef says it makes the leaves shinier)
Crushed eggshells for calcium
Metals for iron and zinc
Now I’m a professionally trained horticulturalist so I’m sceptical about these kinds of DIY hacks. I do know that many of them have old origin stories and that they’re often passed down through generations by word-of-mouth. While I choose not to partake in them myself, I’m not about to take the moral high ground (unless I’m asked to professionally 😜) and to be fair to Josef, his Cane Begonia, Coleus, lemon tree, avocado sapling (grown from seed) and his stonking big money tree (Crassula) speak for themselves. In fact, Josef was generous enough to give me two stem cuttings of his money tree to root in water. Proof, I feel, that plants do indeed open your heart.
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