Just about nine years ago, I got a clivia (that’s a type of lily, not a venereal disease, thou dirty minds). It was a baby from one of my grandmother’s larger plants and helped to give some life to the large rambling Victorian I was occupying during my first residence in Newton. Before that I really had very little ability to keep a plant from dying. But I had a nice triple set of windows on the street side of the living room, complete with shelves and a window seat. I made it part of my morning ritual to water the big green leaves before heading off to Worcester for another marathon day of tours.
I called her Ophelia. In fact, she is really the only living plant I’ve actually named. At that time, I didn’t have much for television beyond some scratchy reception of Boston stations. So I often filled the quiet of that house with the constant repeat of Branagh’s Hamlet. With the quotes of the play running through my mind in the odd quiet moments, I found the inspiration to name her after the play’s doomed heroine.
Ophelia has been with me (except for the months I was in London) ever since, moving with me all over this state. Back to Oakham, to Worcester, to Barre, and then once again to Newton. In the Washington Park apartment, Ophelia found new life in my sunny big room on the third floor. She drank up all that afternoon sun and bloomed for the first time ever while sitting on one of those deep window sills. In my current location, she gained height and breadth on the bookshelf in my Brady Bunch kitchen, where she has bloomed more than once a year.
I was inspired to move her and some of the other plants I’ve managed to collect over the years out onto our little ‘balcony.’ Last summer I moved her back in pretty quickly, uncertain about road dust. But I thought the persistent sun would be a good thing this summer. Unfortunately there were some drenching rain storms at the start of the ‘warm’ season. And, yes, there is a small amount of irony that the plant I named Ophelia drowned.
I brought her back inside when I noticed the leaves lost their perkiness. Worse than that, little holes started drying out in the center of the leaves. It wasn’t a bug situation. I just figured she needed to dry out. So I put her back in her spot by the kitchen window. But it turned out the soil was rotten. So after a couple weeks of hoping for evaporation, I repotted her.
A clivia has roots that densely entangle themselves in the soil. Ophelia’s roots were a soggy, loose mess. Kind of like a brain that has become uncoiled. Indeed, some of it was so severe, I had to amputate. But I put the remnants and her pocky leaves back in the pot with fresh soil… and waited.
She didn’t die in the kitchen. Indeed, as I repotted her, a stem of new blossoms was starting to shoot up. It stopped a third of the way and the blossoms fell too soon, though not losing their orange brilliance. But she had to compete for sun and space with that showy Christmas cactus and the other ravenous sun glutton I’ve rested there. Then, a few weeks ago when I moved the furniture around in my bedroom to make room for my settee, I found a new resting place for Ophelia.
She sits by herself in the sun while I’m at work. I water her with the remnants of my water bottle once a week… and slowly, but surely the bases of her leaves are a fresh green. And now there are two new leaves bursting through the center.
I had to be merciless with some of the big beautiful leaves that just didn’t want to stay connected any longer. Indeed, they may have gone back to the Auburndale days. And some of the remaining elders still have dried out holes. But it is clear she has bounced back and I am confident she will thrive once more, in spite of her name.
I want to sum this up with a Shakespeare quote… but my memory is neither recollecting the play from whence it comes or the correct syntax of the phrase. But it is something relative to ‘drowns in his own too much.’ It is easy to drown in one’s own … especially when one is a plant at the mercy of self-ambulatory beings to transform circumstance.
But with a change of light and some hard, perhaps painful, pruning eventually one can grow green again.
