JOURNAL: Sunday, Dec. 2nd

The poinsettias and Christmas cacti are out in all the stores again. Every year I’m lured to buy one of each. It’s how I celebrate the beginning of the season.

Actually, this is a strange way for me to mark this festive time, mainly because I hate plants. Well, I don’t really hate plants – what irritates me about them is their unpredictability, their intolerance, their fickleness.

In the flower shops, the plants have a language of lovers. The azaleas pucker their beautiful bud mouths to me and whisper that their pretty complex flowers will soothe and uplift me for years; they seduce me into believing them. Strands of ivy, strong and pliable, tell me how much I need them around me – like a lover’s embrace. The peace lily reminds me that I’m part of a natural order that can be beautiful now and then. While they’re still in the shops I understand their enticing language. But when I get them home the plants revert to some mysterious gibberish that’s incomprehensible to me.

I buy calanchoe, prayer plants, begonias, rhododendron like some devotee to the plant gods, knowing that the mysteries of what makes living things thrive and what makes them perish will be visited on these plants without my ever understanding why.

I’m not so much concerned about plants dying – that would be easier. If they could only push out one last gasp to tell me that the game is over and it’s time to take them from their pots and return them to the good earth via the Johnson’s compost pile next door, I’d feel better. No, it’s the invalids that frustrate me: the ones who look like marathon runners in the store but within a month become sad, wilted, spotted creatures that don’t deserve to live for any aesthetic reason, yet are still too full of life for me to commit plantocide.

I sometimes think that I should purge my apartment of all living plants and decorate it with those silk ones that only need to be dusted now and then. They wouldn’t mock me or accuse me of incompetence by displaying brown tips or yellowed leaves. They wouldn’t drop their flower buds before they’ve opened. They wouldn’t speak to me in a language, so mysterious that it changes its meaning depending on the season, or time of day. Silk plants would sit there, frozen in their posed, wire stemmed beauty, doing their job of decorating, demanding nothing in return.

I know I’m ranting – and all because I put out a few dollars for a couple of seasonal plants, the kind of plants that should know enough to die gracefully by the end of January so that I’m not left to explain why, despite my brown thumb, I have a thriving poinsettia out on the deck in June.

Then there’s my fig tree. Other people have fig trees that are full and lush. Mine is embarrassing.

I remember when Carrie, Jen and I got it. We were in third year at university and it was the first time that I’d lived in an apartment where we actually had a living room to sit in – where each and every room (besides the kitchen and bathroom, of course) didn’t have to be designated as a bedroom to cover the rent.

If Martha Stewart had seen us, she’d have been very proud. Carrie, the tidy roommate, had the use of her dad’s car for a whole weekend in September. We went to Wal-Mart and bought this fig tree. We brought it home and put it in the far corner of the bright living room as Jen, the messy roommate, had heard that plants needed indirect sunlight. We gave it some water and some plant food. We were happy to share our living space with this new symbol of our maturity and aesthetic awareness.

We soon discovered why it’s sometimes called a "weeping" fig. The next morning, there were two leaves on the floor. By the end of the week, the centre branches were bare and a mound of dry leaves had gathered around the trunk, like some tiny band of elves had come to rake them into a pile. It was like watching a pet goldfish, rising a bit more each day, slowly moving towards its final destiny: floating on top of the water.

When I think of the language of plants, the fig is the most difficult to understand. It has a single word/symptom vocabulary that it uses to voice everything. It has one mantra that serves it in all circumstances: Drop some leaves…

Too much water: Drop some leaves… Too dry: Drop some leaves… Too cold, change of light, change of direction: Drop some leaves… Trim some branches, give it plant food: Drop some leaves... It’s that stupid tree’s response to every change, good or bad. You’d think that even a tree would know enough to react well to positive change and let you know with some negative sign if the change is for the worse – not the fig. Happy or sad: Drop some leaves…

Almost every sentient being (as Bill would call them in his Buddhist terminology) has a certain tolerance for change – things get a bit better or a bit worse, they tend to be able to handle some degree of fluctuation. Not the fig – it is the perfect reactionary change-o-meter. The hands on the clock moved: Drop some leaves…A robin flew by the window: Drop some leaves…

So why have I kept this ridiculous tree with me through four apartments, two and a half university degrees and six years of lesson plans and reports? Because the damn thing won’t die. Sensitive as it is to everything, there’s this core of resiliency that won’t let it give up. For every leaf that falls, tiny shoots push out at the tip of branches and bud into new leaves. Every naked grey-brown stem has its mate of soft clear green that speaks of its determination.

After eight years together, I’ve come to admire that.
Copyright 2003