Sunday, April 23, 2006

My Year as a Stalker

I took malicious self-denigratory pride in my hortocidal ways.  That is to say, I kill plants and have chosen not to be ashamed of it.  I don’t do it on purpose but it happens most every time I try to keep one alive.  I did have a spider plant in college, but since then, I have left a trail of drowned, desiccated, burned-out or under-exposed plants in my wake – a trail that lies empty and sere through the landscape of gardeners and keepers-of-houseplants who seem to constitute most of the human race.  Not me, though.  I kill plants. 

Anyway, that’s what I said till last year when I got a birthday present that seemed designed to challenge this perceived incapacity to foster plant life: for my birthday a very dear friend sent me a kit for growing bamboo at my desk.  Bamboo is a grass, a sturdy monocot that, once in place, is famously hard to remove – but this particular fistful of stalks had an especially tough challenge to overcome, and I felt fear in my heart for their precious young lives as I gazed over my present.  It was a very thoughtful gift, but damn if it didn’t put me in a tough spot.  I would have to try to keep a plant alive now.  Not just for my sake or the plant’s, either – this time it was a symbol of a friendship I valued deeply, and that meant the game was on for real this time.  Project Genesis was underway. 

The pack consisted of a little plastic planter, a packer of gel crystals, and five segments of bamboo stalk.  Each one shone with naive toughness and was green as a rainforest; they looked utterly foreign under the buzzing lights at my workstation, but I was not going to let my friend down – nor the plants, nor myself.  Those bastardsuckers were going to thrive for me, goddamnit. 

I tore open the packet of crystals and dumped them into the planter, and arranged within them the five stalks upright in a little ring in the middle.  The crystals looked like ground glass and only filed a few inches of the three-inch-tall planter, but once I added water they swole up significantly and within a few hours they’d overflowed onto my desk. Clearly I was already dabbling in strange and mysterious powers.  The stalks that had been teetering in a paltry layer of pseudosoil were now wedged in nicely and gave every impression of vitality, each striving vertically from the waterlogged crystals below to the fluorescent fixtures above.  I was sustaining life.  Just like God. 

Within a fortnight my illusions of godlike generative capacities were ratcheted somewhat back, as I noticed that two stalks weren’t really pulling their weight, thrive-wise.  They had developed yellow spots on their leaves, which turned shortly mostly yellow with black spots.  I was outraged – I had done my part to provide them with occasionally refreshed hydration and plenty of overhead lighting and paperwork and keyboarding, yet 40% of my desktop bamboo thicket was failing.  Out of curiosity I plucked the underperforming specimens from the planter and saw that they were blotched, puckered and rotting down where the crystals covered them.  Root development was inconsequential.  For the health of those remaining, I had to cull the deadwood.  It felt sadly familiar as I threw them away. 

At least I had three stalks left, I consoled myself, but after a few more months two of them had also succumbed to the creeping rot that seemed destined to wipe me out in triumphant reiteration of my horticultural incompetence.  I extracted them too from the planter and dropped them unceremoniously into the trash.  Only one stalk still remained standing, and it was leaning now pretty badly – but otherwise, actually, it looked okay.  It had a bunch of new leaves in an approximately verdant hue and it looked like it wanted to send off a branch or a shoot or whatever it’s called.  Gingerly I pulled it from the cup of crystals to check it below the plimsol line, and found a complex root structure dangling pale and delicate before me.  This one was doing great.  I just needed to give it a new home with a little more support. 

The original planter had been generously proportioned to hold a little five-stalk bamboo forest.  Now that I’d lost 80% of the crop, there was too much room and the sole survivor couldn’t get the support it needed.  What I needed was a cup, and, to my shock and delight, I had one.  It held roses – five or six tiny ones, stuck in tired green polyfoam, where they’d been for about 18 months as a dried-out throwaway office gift from a meeting on a long-past valentine’s day.  Though they had a permanent place on my desk, I didn’t even see them in front of me anymore.  They’d long since stopped being flowers to me, and had turned into a sort of hole where reality didn’t quite reach.  But I could dump those little bundles of crispy petals and that dusty faded foam frog, and fill the now-empty plastic cup with rubbery hydrocrystals and a single proud piece of undefeated bamboo, and have a truly living thing standing at my desk to greet me everyday. 

So that’s what I did, and that’s what I have – even now, today.  Chlorophyll has stained the once-clear crystals green, and maybe the new leaves are coming in a little pale, but they’re still shining with pure vital energy.  I didn’t think I had it in me, but after a full solid year and all the setbacks we’ve overcome, I guess I can finally admit that I do.  Talk about a gift that keeps on giving. 

When I told Pea about this essay she suggested that it might make little curly lines come out of her head, as if she were an animated figure being exposed to something odorous or surprising.  I can’t worry about that.  My priority is keeping that plant alive and if she can’t be part of the solution, she’s part of the problem.  Not that there’s any problem but she’d be part of it if there were one.  Just to spite me, she would.  She’s such a troublemaker.