Monthly Archives: April 2012

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what were your roots before you were born

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You’ll have to tell me if there’s a theme building through this week.  Oh by the way, it’s so nice to be back writing every day.  Thank you for being so patient with my wild absences.

This is the Norfolk Pine.  It began one Christmas as a desktop tree.  You know, the kind you see on the counters of banks and drugstores, plunked in a red foil diaper and pinned with a plastic bow that would make even a shih tzu die of shame.  I think we bought it because it was the year my father died and none of us had the energy to put up the usual tree.  It likely sat on our dining table – back in days when we had a dining room and not a zendo – decorated tastefully with an ornament or two.

It started to fail over time and I had enough vitality myself to just get it to the outer room.  We call this euphemistically the “sunroom” perhaps meaning only that it faces south and gets a lot of sun.  It is insulated but has no source of heat so in the winter everything freezes.  The tree in its little pot sat on the shelf in the window from about March to the following May or June.  I recall I was desperate to clean up the “sunroom” so I could use it as a potting shed.  That meant everything had to go!  I picked up the pot with the now-dessicated and dead tree – which came as no surprise being left for over a year in a room alternately hot and freezing cold with no water or nourishment.  As I started to pull the little tree out, a flash of colour slipped out of view: there in a wedge between the main trunk and a branch was a little spot of green.

Over the years, the Norfolk has grown to about three feet.  One Christmas, when I ran out of energy again, it served as the Seasonal Tree, happily reincarnating to its role before it was born.

There is surely a theme here, building defiantly to some conclusion.

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eternity in a seed

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Did you know cyclamen are tubers and not bulbs?  In the grander scheme of death and destruction, it probably means little to most of us that a plant is more akin to a potato than a tulip.  In terms of caregiving however, it might make some difference.

I’ve always loved the astonishing flowers of the cyclamen; angel wings swooping back poised to descend on earth yet never quite completing the landing.  Over the years I’ve bought several of these plants and enjoyed the displays all the more for thinking they were like forced tulips – lovely and poignantly impermanent for being constrained in a pot.  The cyclamen were even more exotic because they could not grow in my garden and were only available pre-grown.

When the first one I had began to die, I called in to the CBC gardening show and asked about saving it.  The instructions I got were simple: water it without letting it touch the “bulb.”  It died anyway and I resigned myself to having short-term romances with the plant, composting them when the flowers wilted.

One day while watering the plant, I noticed that the leaves were flattened exposing a view of the bulb shifted off-center.  Immediately I blamed our little Zen Master Sprout who had been seen occasionally testing the plants for their snooze factor.  Because, in my view, this particular plant had lasted the longest of all the plants (it might even be ten years old), I put some effort into reading up on how to revive it and solve the mystery of the transported bulb.

Apparently, cyclamens grow from tubers.  It would seem my dear plant is and is not my dear plant at all.  It is several generations removed having produced shoots from its tubers and happily procreating all these years.

Then I learned about the cyclamen fruit, a round pod left after the petals dried and fell off.  This I had thought was the end of the plant; it signalled a parting of company as I walked it to the compost heap.  In fact, it was the beginning – of sticky brown seeds and new life.

There’s a lesson in this.