Making It Up

I love plants but they just don't love me back. As I child I was conned by my green-thumbed mother. She would line all the windowsills in the the kitchen and dining room with little yoghurt cups. Into each of these yoghurt cups she would put water and a leaf. In weeks the leaves would start sprouting roots and then she would transfer these rooted leaves into cups of dirt. Out of these dirt-filled cups would sprout real plants which would then flower. From a leaf to a flower without breaking a sweat. Often, as she headed to work, she would take one, or several, of these plants to hand over to a coworker. She made it look so easy that I thought there was nothing to it.

Silly me, I never wondered why she needed to take the plants in to work to give to other people if making them grow was so easy. A disastrous experience with high school biology put me off learning anything about plants and yet, having grown up surrounded by green life, I feel incomplete (dare I say, half alive) without greenery around me. And yet I live in New York City. Is that what one could call irony?

My first encounters with rearing plants ended in pots of soil, haunted by the plant that had lived a very short life in the pot. I tried the things that I had read - fertilizer, moving the plant around the apartment to try different lighting situations, varying the watering schedule - but to no avail. The plants just died. Finally, I resorted to begging and that has given me some success. I adopt them, like they are my children, I try to give them pretty names (mostly because my biology rebellion has led me to not know what anything's official name is) and I try to make my love keep them alive.

I still have my little fire that I got back in 2006, on a visit to the Bronx Zoo. All I can say is that, at times when the plant was struggling and barely a leaf in the pot and the only thing that brought her back from the edge was my singing and desperate entreaties for her to just hold on a little longer. She must like something about me because she has stuck around and she has convinced others to stick around with me.

But let me tell you about when my mother came to visit. She would putter around my green space, aka the corner in my apartment where plants don't die, and, by the time she left a month later, my plants were the most robust they have ever been. I mean, I have never seen so much green in my space. Not only that, one plant was growing out of its pot and she took leaves from the plant and replanted them in another pot. Over a year later, those leaves are still a plant. After she left, I tried the same thing and those leaves were dead within a fortnight.

I have asked how she does it and she shrugs as though it's nothing. She looks at a plant and it blooms. I look over and the plant smells my fear.