Telling Real from Faux: Brutus the Parrot

Real, not faux!

Yesterday I talked about faux. Faux fruit. Faux flowers. Faux plants. The best place I’ve found in Northern New Jersey to purchase quality faux plant material is at a garden center in Madison, NJ. That’s right. J&M Home & Garden (http://www.jmhg.com/) on Main Street in Madison has a terrific selection of faux. . .as well as a terrific selection of real. . .as well as a parrot named Brutus, whom I visit.

I figure that it’s no surprise my girlfriend Ginger, she of the faux plants that look real, introduced me to J&M years ago. It’s a great place to browse for gifts and end up taking something home for yourself. Really! And when I visit I always think of my good friend who now resides in St. Louis.

He's a good listener.

Another major reason I keep returning to J&M is Brutus the parrot. I’ve had a thing for large birds for as long as I can remember. I can easily talk with Brutus for 30 minutes or more, if small children aren’t around. Small kids get annoyed if I take up too much of the big guy’s time! I visit Brutus the parrot on a weekday at midmorning. He’s usually alone then and willing to take a few minutes out of his busy day to talk with me. He’s a good listener too. It’s a very good quality large birds have; they kinda tilt their heads, look at you with one wise eye and nod periodically as you talk. It’s more than many spouses do! In addition, since he resides in a very large, bright, sunny, warm, Florida-like greenhouse, I get a huge dose of vitamin D, my shoulders relax and I leave a kinder happier person.

My advice if the weather has you down? Find a garden center greenhouse. Walk through it slowly and touch the plants. Meander up and down the rows. . .and remember that spring, the real no-snow spring, is just around the corner!

P.S. Did you figure out which plants in the photos I posted yesterday are faux? Answer: the forget-me-not plant, the apples and the fern in the photo of the three large plants in my dining room.

Faux, the New Real

Well?

I used to be a real stickler for everything in my home being real, genuine. I had an unbreakable rule: Real fruit in the fruit bowl, even if no one ever ate it. Real flowers artfully displayed, even if we weren’t expecting company. If it wasn’t real, I didn’t display it or arrange it. Years went by, and it became an almost full-time job keeping ahead of the rotting, wilting, uh, expense of it all. The real fruit rotted in the fruit bowl before it was time to go to the food store again. The real flowers wilted and died halfway through the week they were guaranteed to last.

Keeping one step ahead of the rotten and dead took up too much of my psychic energy and free time after a while. Week after week, it was a choice between either eating the last apple or making something out of it. And how much fruit can one family eat anyway? Or flowers. I’d spend an hour or two arranging flowers only to have them kick the bucket after a couple of days. I wanted to change, but I didn’t know quite what to do. I mean, fresh fruit and flowers make a home feel more homey to me and I hated to give that feeling up, but the plasticky flowers and jeweled fruit I grew up with didn’t seem like viable alternatives.

Then in walked my girlfriend Ginger. When she lived close by (now she lives in St. Louis <sniff>) we visited back and forth pretty often. One afternoon I walked into her kitchen and exclaimed over the new rosemary topiary sitting on the kitchen counter. She smiled as I walked over to rub a leaf and catch a whiff. When I got thisclose I realized the rosemary topiary was faux. It was fake and it didn’t look fake or gross! It was a revelation!

Another time soon after I walked into Ginger’s dining room and saw a very pretty tree. It looked like it needed watered, though, since a few curled up brown leaves rested on top of the pot. Ginger smiled. Faux! It was faux!

Ginger sold me on faux. She coached me: Start with a high-quality faux plant, add a few “real” elements to the tableau (the dried up leaves, for example) and you can fool most of the people most of the time. Now I use faux in my home, selectively, and to great effect.

Quick! Real or faux?

Soooo????

Well? All real? All faux? A mix??