April 14, 2018 – Being defiant and finding a delightful surprise.

         Over the years, I have tried African violets in my home.  Most of the time I didn’t have the correct light or I had to give them away when we had a corporate move.  They like defused light and in the last few years, I had been on the “hunt” for a specimen.  Surprisingly, I wasn’t finding them in any of the local stores and when I did they looked half dead. I am not sure about you, but I don’t buy half-dead anything when it comes to plants.  I’m not “nurse Nancy” with new plants. I want the best that money can buy. 

Last fall when I was up in Massachusetts cleaning out my Mom’s house to get it on the market, A long-time friend of my Mom’s offered me a side plant of one of her African Violets.  I gladly took it because it looked healthy and the mother plant was blooming, a good sign.

         I shoved the newly potted African violet into a bag in the back seat of the car wrapped loosely with a t-shirt so that it wouldn’t get damaged on the two-day drive home.  When it arrived home I watered it from the bottom and put it in the front living room window and it looked like it was going to survive.

About  two weeks into it being in my care, the violet looked dusty to me. With skin-temperature water I sprayed all the leaves and soaked the soil throughly, then set it to drain for a few hours in a brighter spot.  Later I moved it back into the diffused light. Within a week it jumped to life. And, me all these years taking the advice of “Never wet the leaves of an African violet because you spot the leaves or rot the crown.”  HAH – just the opposite – it jumped to life and now when I do water it I use the same skin-temperature water spraying the leaves and set it out to dry, then move it back to the diffused light.  In a matter of days, what do I get?  Flower for me, the defiant one. I will do just the opposite of what all the gardening books tell you because I see results.

  

         We had several killing frosts this spring.  Half of my Hostas turned to mush – like a frozen head of lettuce – one day they look like beautiful curls of leaves coming up and the next day –slimy green mush like lettuce that was put in the freezer instead of the refrigerator. [Have you ever done that?  I did it once, hurrying to put away groceries before I caught the telephone.  I mistakenly  put the lettuce in the freezer and the ice cream in the refrigerator.  You can imagine the outcome.  No, this was not recent. This was when I was about thirty-five and trying to be super woman and do it tall. That was at a time when we didn’t have telemarketing telephone calls and you actually knew someone you wanted to speak to was on the other end of the line.  Can you remember those idyllic days before robocalls? I sure do.]

          Off point - back to the story.  Third year in a row on the frozen mush Hostas, second year in a row on the Bradford Pear blooms frozen and dropping and now the first year that my Bleeding hearts [Dicentra spectablis] were tall enough to get frozen to the ground.  Usually when they are 6 to 8 inches they can withstand a nip or even a short freeze, but this year, my bleeding hearts were in bloom a few days and the frost turned them limp and mangled.  A sad moment for me as I had dug them up under Daddy’s direction from his  garden years ago, the last summer he was alive.  He had gotten his original plant from his Mom’s garden some 65-plus years earlier.  So, it was disappointing that my “family heirloom plants” had been assassinated by the frost. 

But, surprise, surprise after two weeks of relatively warm nights I noticed yesterday that they had bounced back and are in bloom. 

Hurrah, for strong “family roots.”