My Magical Plant

I lived in a dormitory my freshman year in college. The northwest corner room on the third floor with a picturesque view of I-94 out the window. I believe there were thirty-two girls living on the floor. Thirty of us survived the first year. A girl named Diane left in the first couple of weeks. In that short period of time she came to the conclusion that she preferred the life she had come from to the academic/party atmosphere she had just taken the plunge into. Sometime later in the fall a girl across the hall from the room I shared with Shelly from Hibbing also left. Linda left rather quickly and travelled light, she gave away many of her possessions as she was packing to leave. She had a number of plants in the room she shared with some girl from Aberdeen, SD, so many plants that their room seemed to be jungle-like to me. Linda gave me one of her plants. I pretended to be thrilled. Well, maybe not thrilled, but at least pleasant if puzzled at her gift. It was an odd looking plant. Kind of a stick in some soil with two leathery looking, battered leaves perched near the top of said stick. I set it on my windowsill. A couple of days later as I was watering it, both leaves fell off. I felt like Charlie Brown when he hung the ornament on the pitiful little Christmas tree and feared he had killed it. I was now the proud owner of a stick in some dirt in a cut-off creme rinse bottle. Being a procrastinator I did not throw the thing away. And a week or so later I discovered tiny shoots protruding from the dents where the two original leaves had dropped from. I thought, hmmm. The tiny sprouts continued to grow and soon were sporting new leaves. Over the course of that winter it grew like crazy and seemed to thrive on my brown-thumbed neglect. Cool, I thought. A plant that I can't kill. I came to learn that the plant was called a hoya. A tropical plant that is actually a parasite, it lodges itself opportunistically on trees and sometimes ends up killing the hand that feeds it. It has been known to grow and twine about whatever is in the way, even the tree branch that is its source of water and life. The hoya is almost magically heliotropic, you can watch the newest growing tendrils track across the room in a dance with the moving light of the sun. I was often asked if my hoya had ever bloomed for me and the reply was always no. I was told that they prefer lots of water/sparse watering, fertilizer/never to fertilize, direct light/a light filled room in order to bloom. I inadvertently tried all of these combinations as I moved from address to address and placed my hoya in whatever window seemed the most suitable. Over the years it grew into a monster of a plant with resplendent waxy, deep green leaves. I gave cuttings from it to probably a dozen people, about half of whom reported back to me that their cutting had bloomed. What nerve! I went so far one time as to take a cutting and place it in another room at the other end of the house to see if I could fool it into blooming. Nope. Then, ten years ago I moved the hoya into my small sunroom in the new addition on my home. It has an east-facing patio door that creates a lovely pool of morning light, bright but indirect. This, it seemed, was what my hoya had wanted all along. It developed many blooming nodes that would produce an umbrella shaped display of tiny, pink, star shaped flowers that emitted an intoxicating, honeysuckle scent. It was a miracle to me. After twenty-five years I had finally gotten it right and it bloomed reliably for years, producing these lovely little blossoms from March through September. Imagine my heartbreak when a year ago I discovered that it was infested with some nasty little mite-like bugs that resisted eviction as well as eradication. The infestation turned out to be systemic and I had to dispose of the entire plant. But I had a small cutting that had broken off the main plant months earlier that was in another room and had escaped the plague of mites. I brought it into the sunporch and hoped, but last spring there were no flowers. I am watching it carefully now for signs of blossoms but so far there are none to be found. It is thriving, however, and I expect if it does not bloom this season, it likely will a year from now. I have learned two things from owning this magical plant. The first is patience. That some things are, indeed, worth waiting for. The second is that the true value of a gift is not always apparent upon initial inspection. Some things take time to reveal themselves to you. My hoya reminds me that life is a journey, not a destination.