Green Thumb After All!

My Mom has always been a "Green Thumb" and has loved growing plants, flowers, vegetables, really ANYTHING. She has a fascination with things that grow and transform themselves. Maybe that comes from growing up on a farm, maybe it's just how she is as a person.

With that said, I did NOT inherit that gene from her. I do alright if all I have to do is water a simple plant (see the plant above that I have had FOREVER and has moved with me several times - very easy to keep alive, thankfully!), but I'm not so good at nurturing outdoor plants, giving them the right combination of sun/water/plant food/etc. It just isn't something I have been overly interested in.

Well, now that I own a home and paid a bunch of money for a landscaping guy to come over and plant some shrubs, I feel I need to make sure I take care of them to protect my investment. I have been pretty good about watering them and re-mulching in the spring.

I even bought a huge pot for my back patio and planted 3 kinds of flowers in it last spring (when Mom was visiting - I needed her help and advice, after all!). By the fall, only 1 variety survived in the pot. Oh well - 1 out of 3 ain't bad, right? (Sorry, Meatloaf - didn't make it to "2 out of 3 ain't bad").

Well, I just need to take this opportunity to pat myself on the back for keeping a few plants alive for YEARS and one of them is kind of a special plant.

The plant below is one that my co-workers/employer gave me when my Dad died in January 2003. I casually watered it and amazingly kept it alive quite easily! I didn't really think of it as symbolic until recently - I was watering it and realized that I had had the plant for 7 YEARS! WOW! I think that's a record for me! And now I kind of like the fact that I have it because it reminds me of Dad and it's kind of a way for me to 'keep him alive'.

I almost killed that plant when I moved to Texas. Since movers won't move live plants, I had to take it with Maggie and I in the car. I moved it in and out of 2 different hotels and then into Tammy's house for a month, then into my new house. It almost died at Tammy's, but we nursed it back to health. It has made the move to Ohio and now Texas and still hung on. What a trooper!

Now, since I am treating it as "Dad's plant," every time I water it I think of him and that he's not that far away. What a great gift this plant has been and I walked past it for the last 7 years and really never thought about it at all until now!