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Published: Sep 16, 2005 01:40 PM
Thu - June 10, 2004
At Home In My Little Shop Of Horrors
If horticulture were only as
easy as adding water and dirt ...
I
bore a heavy workload these past few months, but that didn't keep me from my
summer gardening chores—much to the dismay of our increasingly frantic
foliage. To say that I lack a green thumb is like saying that William Hung
lacks musical talent: Painfully
obvious.
Not that I don't care for plants. Not that I haven't tried for years to aerate, fertilize, and water them to health. Not that I haven't read everything Sunset magazine has to say about raising flora—many thousands of words that all amount to: Plants can be hardy survivors once they are established in your yard.
Therein lies the rub.
Because no matter how hard I've tried, my nursing skills liken to Josef Mengele's more than to Clara Barton's. Plants arrive in my care in their photosynthetic prime. They leave–if they last that long—singing the Swan Song from Aida.
Believe me, there's nothing more depressing than a plant singing opera ... except, perhaps, William Hung singing "She Bangs."
If you think I exaggerate my horticultural faults, consider this: How many other people do you know of who have been featured in the gardening section of a major metropolitan newspaper for the crime of killing a perfectly lovely ficus?
As Dave Barrie would say, "I am not making this up."
The homicide occurred in the early-1990s when I lived in an apartment building in Chicago with my two cats and a beautiful, braided ficus tree that I'll call "Rapunzel." Rapunzel resided in an attractive decorative pot, near enough to a large window to enjoy sunshine but far enough away to avoid drafts in the bitter midwestern winter. She was the apple of my eye, and I lavished upon her the single-minded attention of an ardent suitor: fertilizer by candlelight, aphid spray and a rented movie by weekend. We were all any humano-vegetablian couple might have been.
And then, suddenly, things changed. Rapunzel's leaves yellowed, dried, and fell in hideous clumps. Her bark assumed a ghostly pallor. The curse—my gardening curse–caught up with us, and she swooned in its deadly embrace.
I pleaded with her, I cajoled. But when her ebbing condition mocked my feeble ministrations, I panicked. Local bookstores lacked materials on ficus care so I did what any red-blooded, green-thumbed American geek did in the Dark Ages before Amazon.com and the commercialized internet. I logged on to CompuServe and begged its members for gardening help.
CompuServe back then was the acknowledged King of online services. So posting a message to one of its forums reached a significant segment of the entire online gardening population.
Which is the only way I can explain receiving more than 400 responses to my plea.
Many of these suggestions bordered on the fantastic. A woman from Oregon earnestly advised singing lullabies to Rapunzel. A man in San Francisco counseled that plants respond to human auras and asked if my Chakra energies were evenly balanced (I doubt it. Even my checkbooks weren't evenly balanced.) A man in Maryland told me to fill my bathtub and to immerse Rapunzel's pot inside for several days so that the clay would absorb the water. (Apparently, I would not bathe during this time, which means I'd stink to high heaven when they hospitalized me for herniating myself trying to remove Rapunzel's water-laden, hundred pound pot from the tub.)
The more practical suggestions contained wildly contradictory advice about ficus care—water more, water less, fertilize more, fertilize less, move the tree, leave the tree. It quickly became clear that when it came to ficus maintenance, even the so-called experts couldn't agree upon much. But one expert's email caught my attention. It was from Bill Aldrich, the gardening writer for the Chicago Tribune, who had been following the thread and who thought from all the ruckus that a story about how to raise a finicky ficus might interest his readers. Would I agree to be in the article if he could help me get to the <ahem> root of my ficus problem?
As Aldrich was a very nice guy and as I didn't have many other useful proposals to save Rapunzel that didn't involve Chakras, I readily agreed. And that is how, one fine spring morning, Aldrich, a photographer, and an assistant curator of the Chicago Botanical Gardens ended up gathered around Rapunzel for a—
"Post mortem," the curator said, sadly. "This ficus is already dead."
"She can't be dead," I protested. "I did everything for her."
Not everything, apparently. Ficus trees have tightly bound root balls. Buying one in a large decorative pot, rather than in a pot almost too small for the plant brought on Rapunzel's death from root rot. As the curator exhumed her corpse, alternately soothing me and shaking her head at the wrongs I had wrought, the photographer snapped pictures of the crime scene.
Aldrich's article about the finicky ficus appeared several weeks later.
It was not what I had expected. I had imagined a small feature buried on an inside page of an obscure section of the weekday paper. Instead, the article—and a photo of me the size of Rapunzel herself–ran on the front of the popular Sunday "Style" section with a headline large enough to read from space.
"Well," I rationalized, "maybe nobody at work will notice."
Riiiight.
I worked at a firm in the Sears Tower with 350 people and when I exited the elevator on my floor on Monday, the lobby was plastered with the article. Coffee rooms were plastered with the article. My office door was plastered with the article, along with a note from a colleague introducing the painful nickname that I would bear for the remainder of my tenure in that office.
"Welcome to Monday, Nature Boy."
I confess all this to let you know that I have a post doctorate in horticultural homicide. And although I'm older and wiser than I was when Rapunzel returned to the dust from which she came, when you say your prayers this Sunday, it would be a kindness to ask a special blessing for foliage entrusted to my care.
Around our house, it's just not easy being green.
Not that I don't care for plants. Not that I haven't tried for years to aerate, fertilize, and water them to health. Not that I haven't read everything Sunset magazine has to say about raising flora—many thousands of words that all amount to: Plants can be hardy survivors once they are established in your yard.
Therein lies the rub.
Because no matter how hard I've tried, my nursing skills liken to Josef Mengele's more than to Clara Barton's. Plants arrive in my care in their photosynthetic prime. They leave–if they last that long—singing the Swan Song from Aida.
Believe me, there's nothing more depressing than a plant singing opera ... except, perhaps, William Hung singing "She Bangs."
If you think I exaggerate my horticultural faults, consider this: How many other people do you know of who have been featured in the gardening section of a major metropolitan newspaper for the crime of killing a perfectly lovely ficus?
As Dave Barrie would say, "I am not making this up."
The homicide occurred in the early-1990s when I lived in an apartment building in Chicago with my two cats and a beautiful, braided ficus tree that I'll call "Rapunzel." Rapunzel resided in an attractive decorative pot, near enough to a large window to enjoy sunshine but far enough away to avoid drafts in the bitter midwestern winter. She was the apple of my eye, and I lavished upon her the single-minded attention of an ardent suitor: fertilizer by candlelight, aphid spray and a rented movie by weekend. We were all any humano-vegetablian couple might have been.
And then, suddenly, things changed. Rapunzel's leaves yellowed, dried, and fell in hideous clumps. Her bark assumed a ghostly pallor. The curse—my gardening curse–caught up with us, and she swooned in its deadly embrace.
I pleaded with her, I cajoled. But when her ebbing condition mocked my feeble ministrations, I panicked. Local bookstores lacked materials on ficus care so I did what any red-blooded, green-thumbed American geek did in the Dark Ages before Amazon.com and the commercialized internet. I logged on to CompuServe and begged its members for gardening help.
CompuServe back then was the acknowledged King of online services. So posting a message to one of its forums reached a significant segment of the entire online gardening population.
Which is the only way I can explain receiving more than 400 responses to my plea.
Many of these suggestions bordered on the fantastic. A woman from Oregon earnestly advised singing lullabies to Rapunzel. A man in San Francisco counseled that plants respond to human auras and asked if my Chakra energies were evenly balanced (I doubt it. Even my checkbooks weren't evenly balanced.) A man in Maryland told me to fill my bathtub and to immerse Rapunzel's pot inside for several days so that the clay would absorb the water. (Apparently, I would not bathe during this time, which means I'd stink to high heaven when they hospitalized me for herniating myself trying to remove Rapunzel's water-laden, hundred pound pot from the tub.)
The more practical suggestions contained wildly contradictory advice about ficus care—water more, water less, fertilize more, fertilize less, move the tree, leave the tree. It quickly became clear that when it came to ficus maintenance, even the so-called experts couldn't agree upon much. But one expert's email caught my attention. It was from Bill Aldrich, the gardening writer for the Chicago Tribune, who had been following the thread and who thought from all the ruckus that a story about how to raise a finicky ficus might interest his readers. Would I agree to be in the article if he could help me get to the <ahem> root of my ficus problem?
As Aldrich was a very nice guy and as I didn't have many other useful proposals to save Rapunzel that didn't involve Chakras, I readily agreed. And that is how, one fine spring morning, Aldrich, a photographer, and an assistant curator of the Chicago Botanical Gardens ended up gathered around Rapunzel for a—
"Post mortem," the curator said, sadly. "This ficus is already dead."
"She can't be dead," I protested. "I did everything for her."
Not everything, apparently. Ficus trees have tightly bound root balls. Buying one in a large decorative pot, rather than in a pot almost too small for the plant brought on Rapunzel's death from root rot. As the curator exhumed her corpse, alternately soothing me and shaking her head at the wrongs I had wrought, the photographer snapped pictures of the crime scene.
Aldrich's article about the finicky ficus appeared several weeks later.
It was not what I had expected. I had imagined a small feature buried on an inside page of an obscure section of the weekday paper. Instead, the article—and a photo of me the size of Rapunzel herself–ran on the front of the popular Sunday "Style" section with a headline large enough to read from space.
"Well," I rationalized, "maybe nobody at work will notice."
Riiiight.
I worked at a firm in the Sears Tower with 350 people and when I exited the elevator on my floor on Monday, the lobby was plastered with the article. Coffee rooms were plastered with the article. My office door was plastered with the article, along with a note from a colleague introducing the painful nickname that I would bear for the remainder of my tenure in that office.
"Welcome to Monday, Nature Boy."
I confess all this to let you know that I have a post doctorate in horticultural homicide. And although I'm older and wiser than I was when Rapunzel returned to the dust from which she came, when you say your prayers this Sunday, it would be a kindness to ask a special blessing for foliage entrusted to my care.
Around our house, it's just not easy being green.