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KNOWING WHEN TO LET GO
IS ALWAYS A PRIORITY
Journal of Healing – Sept. 13, 2006

By Mary Koch

If we were to list the aristocrats of house plants, my nomination would be the elegant and lush Boston fern. Nephrolepis exaltata, indeed a plant for exaltation. Its graceful, feathery fronds reach heavenward, then arch back to earth like an emerald fountain.

Unless, of course, it has the misfortune to be under my so-called care. Like aristocrats, Boston ferns require high maintenance. To survive in our home, plants must thrive on benign neglect.

It’s a matter of priorities. Congenitally over-committed, I spend every waking moment setting priorities. I pay attention first to living beings, followed by everything else.

You might think my husband is my No. 1 priority, but no. Me first. It took a long time for me to fully understand – much less acknowledge publicly – that if I am to take the best possible care of my husband, my own health and well-being are the No. 1 priority.

After the two of us, come other people and pets. Houseplants – if they’re still alive by the time I get around to them – are next.

It’s because of my husband’s green thumb that we have any houseplants at all. Most of them are carry-overs from the good old days, before his stroke, when he tenderly and religiously nurtured a botanical collection that ranged from A to Z, aloe to zebrine pendula (“wandering Jew”). John loved the challenge of propagating, even sterilizing and enriching his own soil to get young plants off to a good start.

* * *

THE STROKE hit on a snowy morning early in December. We left the house in an ambulance, not realizing that – except for a few, quick overnight stays on my part – we wouldn’t return until a warm day in May. Meanwhile, John’s daughter Katie loyally watered plants.

A few days after we returned home, I happened to look into the long-since idle oven. There I found cookie sheets piled with dirt that John had been sterilizing. He’d planned to give each of his children Christmas gifts of jades that he had propagated.

When you’re struggling to set priorities, it’s a challenge to fit in an oven full of dirt. Not to mention that our inventory of house plants had actually expanded. The stroke prompted many gifts of plants from friends.

We were living amidst botanical splendor, but not for long. John – unable to speak – was forced to watch silently, day after day, as plants drooped and gasped. W-A-T-E-R V-I-O-L-E-T-S, he would spell out pleadingly with his eye-blink code. P-R-U-N-E J-A-D-E.

* * *

SOMEHOW, the African violets survived. They and a few others stubbornly hang on, digging their roots deeper into the delicious soil John prepared for them many years ago.

Occasionally John is given more new plants, and he enjoys them for as long as they can tolerate my offhand care. I’m not so callous as to let them just die. Most, however, endure a near-death experience. When I notice their desperate state, I send them off to a more beneficent home.

Such was the fate of the Boston fern – a gift the Christmas before last. That’s a pretty good survival record, but this summer its fronds turned brown and then became bare sticks. With just enough green to maintain credibility, it went off to the more accommodating dampness of western Washington.

Some day I hope to have enough time to tend a Boston fern. A time when I’ll have no higher priorities than to indulge its thirst for a daily misting. But I hope that’s no time soon.

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