CULTURE
Saving the Hibiscus
By Kevin Johnson
I bought a potted plant at Home Depot this summer. An impulse buy really. A shrub with more sticks and broken limbs than anything else they called a hibiscus.
The tag showed a thick lush bush with red trumpet-like flowers. But that’s not what I had in my hands. Not by a long shot. When I got it home to my backyard garden I turned it over and slid it out of it’s shipping pot and saw its bottom was overgrown and root bound. The only thing to do when a plant is this badly knotted is to gently pry the roots apart one by one. It’s about as exciting as untangling a fishing reel, but there is no other way, not if you want it to survive. And I did though I wasn’t sure why.
Historically, potted plants in gardens always felt ostentatious to me. Usually after buying a plant I couldn’t wait to get it home, out of its pot and into the dirt as quickly as possible. But we had a patio put in earlier in the year, a square deck of flat, decorative stone that was covered with rattan chairs, a matching table and nine foot market umbrella. Suddenly the area looked formal and lacking in something. Potted plants. Hibiscus would be nice.
I saw a beautiful example, free-spirited and growing wild, recently while volunteering at the Kilbourn Park Organic Gardens greenhouse. Kilbourn Park is a Chicago park district greenhouse dedicated to growing plants and vegetables organically. No pesticides or chemically enhanced fertilizers, a philosophy I try to carry over into my own garden.
I’ve never been the sort of gardener who plants small islands of flowers, neatly separated by color co-coordinated mulch. I think of that as a plant zoo. My own garden grows under the motto the more the merrier. Let my beds be an Ellis Island of natives and immigrants whose cultures blend into a beautiful mix. Nodding peonies, unexpected blurts of dangling wisteria, thickets of oregano and Russian sage all in the same neighborhood. Choosing among flowers is like choosing among children; each has its delights. But even hodgepodge beds require work.
Last winter the greenhouse received on loan an impressive eight foot round, pink flowering hibiscus tree. This behemoth, in its Grecian urn pot, was part of a private owner collection that winters in the Organic Gardens spaces.Many hibiscus species, grown for their showy flowers, are used as landscape shrubs. The simple, oval shaped leaves cradle large, conspicuous and trumpet-shaped flowers with five or more petals ranging in color from white to pink, red, purple or yellow.
This one had three trunks gently twisting into one ornate spindle with large pink flowers surrounding an extruded bright yellow stamen. The plant itself wore a full, even bloom of dark green with leaves cropped tight over a skeleton of powerfully grown limbs and an erect posture.
Wealthy families often bring their large tropical beauties to the Organic Gardens when they become too much to move into the homes for the winter. The effect of these small trees in a row can be staggering to see in person. Like bathing beauties lined up in a beauty pageant. Suddenly I knew that’s what I wanted for my patio. I wanted what I saw in the greenhouse, I bought the same style pot to plant my new plant in. I fertilized, water and placed it squarely on the patio directly in the sun.
But my hibiscus was small, thin and leaned over like a leftover noodle. In a few days it grew worse, and I became depressed. It was a sad looking plant in a sad looking place. The large greeneries cost hundreds of dollars on the lot at Gethsemane Garden Center. Mine cost nine bucks at a hardware store. A gross over expenditure for a bush with barely enough leaves to cause a shuddering in the breeze. But I recognized something along the lines of beautiful in it. It reminded me of Kate.
Kate is my niece who at the age of five pushed open a second story window and fell thirty feet to the driveway pavement below. Kate came from an idyllic family made up of successful father, dutiful mother and lovingly protective older brother and sister. It was a life of presumed security and opportunity. And then she fell. Landing on her head just outside the kitchen window where her mother was washing dishes. That’s what this hibiscus looked like to me. Like it had fallen hard.
The hibiscus is an important flora in the Hindu religion. Its flower is offered to the goddess Kali who is thought of as the deity of death. More accurately, her name translates to “appointed time” –– a gentler understanding one might imagine for the role of death.
For one nervous week, despite my best efforts, I watched the hibiscus slowly die. I tried to imagine how Kate’s parents felt. She spent months in intensive care. The medical bills cost them all of their savings and most of their retirement funds. Eventually nothing more could be offered but prayer. They were told to get her affairs in order. She was still in kindergarten.
It is not unusual for plants to die prematurely in gardens. The wrong PH balance, insects, disease, over watering, drought, deer, acts of God. One gardener friend tells of a summer when his prize-winning roses suffered a Japanese beetle infestation. He mounted a fierce counterattack by giving each flower a soap water bath daily and managed to rescue some but eventually had to accept the fact that you can’t save them all.
And then there are the plants we kill deliberately. Any black-eyed Susan that pops up in the midst of our lily patch is sure to get yanked without mercy. It’s our right as the divine gardener to keep up the balances of order. Some gardeners are petty tyrants. The creeping obsession that afflicts many is a desire to triumph over the forces of chaos and disorder, to battle the unruliness of growing things and hold a firm bridle on the natural world. This urge for order begins to make us lament the frustrations of staking, mowing, uprooting, deadheading pinching back, weeding, training, trimming, and watering.
Learning to live with compromise, uncertainty and failure is one useful goal of gardening. It is learning to accept change. All life is perishable. Some faster than others. And we forget that despite our striving, anguish, limitless sensations and desires, we will become earth itself. We only imagine that the problems we sense as real actually matter. Watching you child on ventilation tube reminds us otherwise.I decided to make the hibiscus’ last inevitable days as pleasant as possible and moved it to a nice shady spot under a tree.
And there it survives.
All year long it’s been making a steady comeback. Its leaves are thickening, new shoots have grown like tiny, green fingers. Its variegated leaves have a healthy red tinge. I even got one trumpeting red flower this year. It’s going to take years of patience, hard work and gentle guidance to get my tall flowering tree. I had made a simple mistake. I got so caught up in what a prized beauty I wanted, I put a partial shade plant in the full patio sun. An error of convenience really. Like leaving a window open.
Kate survived her near death experience. Today she still has her bright and cheery disposition and finally the fog of confusion that used to constantly cloud her thoughts is starting to clear. Over the years she’s begun getting back the spark of self-awareness she once had. Slowly, she’s regaining that brightness behind her eyes of the Kate we knew.
Gardeners are sometimes chided for anthropomorphism, attributing human characteristics to nonhuman plants or animals. We’ve been prohibited from thinking we share similarities with these things. That leads to the assumption we can learn nothing about human behavior by observing plants, animals or other living things around us. But gardens are the crossroads where nature and human nature intersect.
I don’t imagine my plants share human concerns and emotions, but plants do have possession of their own motives and instincts. I can’t imagine they have the full focus of consciences, but they are self-aware. They know when they are hurt. They take stock of their circumstances and have been known to adjust their behavior and continue to grow and heal just as we all do.
Any garden contains unaccountable moments of high drama or riveting calm if you look hard enough. Gardeners certainly live in the moment or the timing of the season, but we also plant for the future, we work the soil of the present and keep the past clearly in mind.
Each flower has a history, a tale of struggle perhaps. Each flower is planted with hope and expectation. A visitor admiring the garden may appreciate how it exists on that day, in that season, on that hour, but to the gardener who has raised their ornamental grounds through many trials, every moment is a thread of memories.
