1-11-01
I love plants. I love taking botany classes. In fact, I excel at botany-related classwork*. And yet somehow I manage to have one of the blackest 'green' thumbs on the planet.
My house contains the mangiest assortment of plants that you can imagine. I have spindly pots of aloe vera coming out my ears. I have spider plants that appear to be on their last legs, yet continue to hang on despite my best neglect. The dracenaceae in the living room looks like it's trying to escape deathrow by climbing out the window. The lemon-scented geranium in the kitchen has never, ever flowered and also looks like it's making a break for freedom via the nearest glazed outdoor aperature. The sanseveria (mother-in-law's tongue) that is supposed to be the last thing living after nuclear holocaust is hovering somewhere between the here-and-now and the hereafter. The philodendron and peace lily are alive, yet drop leaves regularly. Hell, the peace lily actually flowers every spring. The Christmas cactus is putting out pretty pink buds that are ready to burst forth with delightful flowery goodness at this very moment. The pot of mixed hangy-things like zebrina and tahitian bridal veil and wandering jew is threatening to take over the bathroom. I suspect that these plants would even be more lively if I remembered to water and feed them regularly.
If my plants were children, Child Welfare and Protective Services would have swept in here years ago and made off with them like the poor abused little waifs they are.
I've had so many fatalities this year I couldn't even tell you all what had died. Things that are supposed to live fruitfully if never watered and only given good light like cacti either liquefy or wither up in this household. Orchids curl up and shrivel into blackened stumps. And they don't do it all regular-like; they have a peculiar modus operandi.
Generic plant will enter the apartment and thrive like nobody's business for a year. The following year it will still be grand, yet slightly less so. The third year it will start to look like hell in a handbasket and then pretends to die. I feel guilty and make an attempt to nurse it back from death's door, it complies, makes a complete recovery and then ekes out an existence for another six months or so, until it stages and elaborate death scene.
Things that aren't supposed to live for more than a growing season seem to like it here fairly well. I had an ornamental pepper plant that flowered and peppered and flowered and peppered for about a year and a half before dropping all of its leaves and keeling over one day. I can't even bear to go on about other things like the lemongrass or the ginger plant. It breaks my heart.
Outside in my garden, my greatest success has been killing shade-loving perennials by putting them in the ground. The only thing that seems to be immune to my love is the chocolate mint that is taking over the universe, the columbines that pretty much take care of themselves (they only seem to need to be near something they could grow on, in or around to be happy. Moisture and light are superfluous.), and the saddest clump of purple coneflowers I have ever seen with my own two eyes.
I can't even get sunflowers to grow along a sunny, well-irrigated fenceline.
I think it's a genetic thing for me. My mother has some of the most spectacular gardens you'll ever see outside a rustic farmhouse in the country near a major-ish metropolitan area. But inside the house, it looks like plant Dauchau. Things have scaley-bugs and spidermites and mealy-worms (sorry about introducing those into your house, mom!) and a host of other plagues like locusts**. The norfolk pine in the living room must be seen to really be understood.
*One time in botany class, we started cuttings of holly by dipping them in rooting hormones and then sticking them in the watering bench to root. I accidentally dipped the holly in the strongest rooting hormone known to man, and when I asked the professor what would happen were that to occur he told me that the plant would die die die promptly. Strangely, my holly was the only one out of 30+ that not only rooted, but is still growing somewheres in my parent's backyard.
**You can laugh, but my mom had a pot of mums outside during a scary plague of grasshoppers that decimated the countryside. At the end of the growing season, she brought it indoors for the winter. The following spring, the shelf in the kitchen where all of the inmates, I mean plants, live was innundated with the tiniest (and were they not so terribly repulsive, cutest) little grasshoppers you'd ever seen. I think it took an entire can of pesticide to annihilate that mess. And still the other cooties cursing the shelf persisted.
