Climate Change

It’s goodbye tiny apartment and hello to a new home, but why does Sarah feel so uprooted?

- Sarah Quigley

I’m starting to get upset, not least because I sound really stupid

Ten minutes after the removal men have left, I realise I’m missing something. Not my little apartment, which has been my refuge for the past two years; that sense of missing will crash in later. Right now, standing in my new cavernous home, I’m missing my Yucca palm trees.

I race through the many huge rooms, skidding around mountains of boxes, some of which, distressingly, have split open and are spewing out books and papers. The gleaming parquet floor that looked so charming on first viewing creaks alarmingly under my bounding house plant-seeking feet.

‘Where are you, Yuccas? Please, please don’t be lost!’ I’m actually the opposite of a plant person – I have been known to kill them on sight – but Yucca palms are amazingly resilient, capable of living in parched deserts or windy mountainsides, so my two have survived over a decade with me.