The Solarium By Night

Pretty Poison

Down the Garden Path (Miya and Foxglove)

Lost in the Woods

Theatricum Botanicum

Stone Fox



"The only people for me are the mad ones ... mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn....." - Jack Kerouac



Gothic Gardening
Canada: Poisonous Plants / Common Names



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The Solarium by Night

The scene opens with appropriate flashes of lightning and a melodramatic thunderclap...

As the howling winds of night batter her wall of windows with cruel blows from their fists unseen, and the sky rumbles with the belching threat of a coming storm, Foxglove leans over her workbench, her sweet face transformed by the intensity with which she scrutinizes the content of every roiling beaker and placid, passive petri dish.

But the transformation goes beyond being skin deep...

...her clothes are different, too, of course.

Satin and marabou are foregone in favor of a simple cotton t-shirt and a leather apron, and instead of lavendar kidskin and jagged gemstones, her hands are coated in nimble neoprene, as they flex over the network of glass, chaotic copper tubing, and gentle, licking phosphorous flame.

To one side of the mad menagerie is a wasteland of spent cuttings and crushed, shredded bulbs, their lives sacrificed and finer virtues offered up in the name of discovery... or is it insanity?

The litmus test of time will tell, but for now the only real proof lies in a single, shallow bowl at the end of a corkscrew distillery, collecting every shimmering drop of cobalt syrup as it is spat from the mouth of a tiny glass pipe.

Very nearly trembling in awe, she grits her teeth, forcing her hand to steady as she takes up a dropper, and dips it into the dish.

To the other side of the contraption lies a single chrome collar, its shiny surface pulsating with every maniacal lightning flash that ripples across the panes of her outer wall.

With tenacious, spidery grace, she lifts the dropper over the bolt at the front of the shining circlet, and releases a miserly drop. At that moment, a break in the thunder allows for a silence in which that drop's impact resonates, the reverb echoing like static and feedback through the demented recesses of her mind.

As though imbued with a life of its own by the contact, the toxic liquid crawls along the surface of the collar like a weed on steroids taking hold, sizzling with an electric blue crackle and seeping into the metal, casting it with an eerie, dusky glow.