4 Rent: Garden of Eden, Incl. Maint.
There is a gesture, shared by many Europeans--the French and the Italians are particularly good at it--that makes a nerve deep in the American psyche twang like a snapping violin string. It is performed in response to a suggestion of something new, daring, innovative or difficult.
It’s the shrug. And it is the ultimate dismissal. It not only says something isn’t possible, it affirms that it was never possible and never will be possible because it has never been done before. Period.
Naturally, this makes most Yankees nuts. Then it makes us want to prove the silly people wrong. So instead of spending the afternoon tossing coins into the Trevi Fountain, we go off and invent the light bulb or cure polio or build the Panama Canal or go to the moon. Can’t be done? Watch us.
There’s a good bit of glee in this attitude of ours, which makes it fun to spend a little time with Greg Wallace, a man who probably doesn’t know how to shrug. Wallace is the president of a Costa Mesa nursery with a name that sounds like something out of a Road Runner cartoon: Instant Jungle. Which, in a wonderful flash of brevity and truth in advertising, is exactly what the nursery provides.
Instant Jungle International (the full name) rents and leases plants, an enterprise that may surprise people who think of the presence or absence of plants as a kind of botanical absolute. But for people with imagination, vision and a few bucks in their pocket, Wallace can make their rather barren home look like Tarzan’s time-share.
( Mon Dieu! C’est impossible! )
Why rent? Not a bad idea, Wallace said, if you’re in a temporary situation--living in an apartment while waiting for your home to sell, for instance. Also, he said, renting or leasing plants may be a good way to spruce up that home and help it to sell faster.
“People are using plants rather than spending a lot on furniture,” Wallace said. Plants, he added, not only fill a room nicely and detract from the monotony of bare walls and spare furniture, they also can be used to “soften up the edges;” that is, camouflage weak or unsightly sections of the room.
Leasing is a likely option for the home seller who expects the house to be on the market for several weeks or months. Leases, said Wallace, are month-to-month, and maintenance is included in the lease price.
For the most part, however, homeowners who rent plants from Instant Jungle have a party in mind. Garden weddings, theme parties, any Bacchanalia that requires a lot of foliage. Think of the lavish wedding featured in the recent “Father of the Bride” remake and you’ll get the idea, Wallace said.
And we’re not talking about a couple of wimpy potted ferns in the corner, either. If you’ve got the space, the motivation and $250, Instant Jungle will plunk a 20-foot kentia palm in a 90-gallon container next to your no-host bar and pick it up and haul it back home when you’re done.
You don’t have to go quite that crazy, of course. Three-foot pygmy date palms are available, as are various ferns, eugenias, ficuses, birds of paradise and even cactus and bamboos.
Some plants, such as evergreen topiaries, can be strung with lights. And, Wallace said, if looks aren’t necessarily important to you, but smell is, you might want to pop for some jasmine.
Your choice need not even be alive to be available.
Instant Jungle also has a silk plant operation in which exotic flowering plants can be whipped up without such inconvenient natural phenomena as winter getting in the way.
A few of Instant Jungle’s rental items are noticeably more alive than others: for a $55 rental fee, the nursery will provide a pair of white doves in a white cage. These came into demand for weddings, Wallace said, and the idea caught on.
Various pots also are for rent and lease, Wallace said, but in many cases they may be unnecessary.
The rather unsightly stock boxes or pots most of the plants are in when they are delivered are covered or disguised with baskets, moss or trailing or ground-hugging plants as part of the rental or lease deal, he said.
Instant Jungle--whose advertising slogan is “paradise for rent”--also sells plants, but everything at the nursery is for rent, Wallace said.
“Instead of the plants just sitting around here doing nothing, they’re going to parties and having fun,” he said.
“It’s good stimulation for the plants. And they really never suffer any shock, except the occasional champagne overdose.”
So OK. You’re having an Edgar Rice Burroughs film festival at your house, and you want the place to look like a cross between the jungle cruise ride at Disneyland and the bird house at the San Diego Zoo, except with more plants. Can it be done?
Sure.
Shrug.
