I found my most beloved new houseplant in this glorious jungle of an Edinburgh shop and cafe

It was at a gorgeous plant shop in Edinburgh called Grow Urban.

This is the CS Lewis wardrobe of shops. You’re outside, and it’s gritty and grey - aka as urban as the New Town can possibly be - then, you go downstairs into the contrasting landscape of verdant jungle.

I almost expected there to be macaws and macaques, amongst the greenery.

It’s only the other city folk, and the smell of coffee that remind you that you’re in a shop/cafe.

I discovered Fromage right at the back, past the dragon trees, terrariums and Spanish moss, and beside a window where a couple were drinking flat whites. (See, this is a garden centre for hipsters).

He’s about four-foot-tall, with glossy heart-shaped leaves as big as parasols. It was love.

I’ve never owned a BIG plant, like this. However, my friend had generously given me a voucher for this shop, for my 50th birthday, and I slapped down the entire £100 on Fromage.

After all, I’ve just moved house, so I now have space to fit a full sized cheese plant, and, as a child of the Seventies, when they were most popular, I’ve always wanted one.

They get their name because the leaves have holes in them, like Swiss cheese. They are otherwise known as monstera deliciosa. Delicious monster, indeed.

He was delivered to my house, a day or two later, all swaddled in brown paper and string.

After a trial period in the living room, where he seemed to take up too much space, I put him on the stairs, where there’s a big tinted window that gets diffuse afternoon sun.

Since then, I have been a very attentive partner. Whenever I pass him, I whisper ‘you okay?’.

I try to breathe near him, since they inhale carbon dioxide and expend oxygen, so we’ve got a yin-yang thing going. He’s my lung, and vice versa.

I brush past the leaves when I go downstairs and up, because he doesn’t like feeling as if he’s in a vacuum. I’m sure, in the shop, he was being touched all the time.

I’m paranoid about underwatering or overwatering. The friend who gave me the gift voucher was very pleased that I’d spent it on a big plant, rather than lots of teeny ones. She came over, to view Fromage, and fingered the top of his soil.

I got a row - ‘too dry’, she says.

Still, Google warns against root rot from overwatering, so I feel as if I’m always teetering in the middle. It’s a Goldilocks porridge situation.

Since he moved in with me, the leaves have been doing unexpected things. There was a tender new one that was pale green and unfurled itself like a scroll. Apparently, a healthy cheese plant can produce one or two of these a month as it develops. I am excited for the new arrivals.

A couple of the bigger ones have flipped upside down, and I’m scared to find out what that means. It reminds me of those red acetate fortune fish that you’d put on your hand. If they turned over, it meant ‘falsehood’, apparently, rather than just that your palm was sweaty.

The jury is out, when it comes to misting my plant’s leaves. Some people say they like it, others that they don’t.

Still, I have been giving him a little spritz of Le Tap Water d’Edimbourg Cologne now and then.

Anyway, I must try to guard myself against helicopter parenting.

I worry because I had so many bad experiences during lockdown, when houseplant ownership went wild, so I get a bit precious. Most of the ones I acquired back then - some from Grow Urban’s other branch in Fountainbridge, which has sadly now closed down - died.

Not fast though. Slowly. Agonisingly. Going brown from the stem up like they had trench foot. When we moved house, a couple of months ago now, I had to perform a coup de grace on some of them. They were mainly succulents, as well as a spring of pearls that had been hovering between life and death (mainly death) for years. Also, they say that cacti are indestructible, but they’re not.

There was a prayer plant that lost hope and stopped praying, after a few weeks with me. My fault. They had all been miserable in my dingy old ground floor flat, which hardly got any daylight.

However, though it wasn’t well, I did bring my old oxalis triangularis - otherwise known as false shamrock - to the new house with me.

Now, placed near Monsieur Fromage, it’s totally thriving. It’s gone from sparse to bushy. Every day, its feeble-looking white stems enthusiastically press the oxblood coloured leaves up towards the window. There was only one or two of these left, in the old house, now there’s about thirty. At night, they all fold down, like marquees after a party.

I have also acquired a few other new plants for my collection, since that’s what happens when you move.

They’re the number one house warming gift, after a bottle of plonk.

There’s a pink orchid that I’m trying not to water too much, a money tree that’s thirsty all the time, an unidentifiable supermarket shrub and a couple of small cacti.

I’m looking after them all, the best I can.

However, I don’t love any of them as much as my delicious monster.

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