Green scene

Staple of doctor's offices contains wonders

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Few people are fond of snakes. Mothers-in-law and their tongues also have a bad reputation. But a joke that I heard recently asked how far away your mother-in-law should live. The answer was, “Far enough away that she won’t come over in a housedress, but close enough that the casserole is still hot when she arrives.”

Attitudes haven’t changed much in regards to either mothers-in-law or snakes. But people and the plants that surround us undergo gradual — almost invisible — changes. There was a photo essay published  in The New York Times Magazine section several years ago in which a photographer photographed family members every year on their birthday. It was a moving piece of work watching faces morph with age and experience.

Closely watching plants yields similar observations.  When I began gardening, I wanted swaths of colorful blooms. Nature quickly disabused me of that expectation. Color requires intense sunshine, but instead, we were blessed with beautiful, large trees. Trees create shade. Nature, never allowing a vacuum, introduced me to the amazing variety of plants adapted to shade.

What could the Sansevieras possibly have to do with evolving tastes? My general distaste for them must derive from seeing so many of these bedraggled plants in the offices of doctors and dentists. Despite being plunked down on tabletops to bring some lightness to those offices, the plants plainly suffered from low light and poor watering. However, several years ago I was in New City and entered a tall apartment building’s sunny lobby. Large planters wrapped around two sides of the lobby filled with ranks of Sansevieras of differing sizes and colors. Until that moment, I had never seen one that wasn’t  plain mottled gray-green with the leathery, lance-like leaves. The lobby specimens were much more varied and exciting. Some were green, some mottled. Some had yellow borders and yellow streaking while others had white streaking and borders. Some even had leaves that were cylindrical. All in all, the scene evoked wonder for a plant that I would not have considered buying 10 minutes earlier.

Investigating these plants a little further, I was startled to find that they are related to our edible vegetable, asparagus, which is, not surprisingly,  part of the botanical  family Asparagaceae. Members of that family are monocots. Briefly, that means that as the seeds germinate and put out their first true leaves, they have only a single leaf. That is in contrast to dicots, which have two leaves. The bulk of our familiar plants are, in fact, dicots, so a plant that is a monocot always catches my attention. Other examples of monocots include grasses and lilies.

Exploring further, I was curious if white and green asparagus were the same plant. In fact, they are same plant but the white version is achieved by preventing the stalks from beginning to photosynthesize and thereby turning green. This is done by farmers mounding earth over the asparagus stem as it continues to emerge from the soil. By doing so, photosynthesis does not begin in the stalk.

Propagating plants is always fun, although there is a tradeoff between time and money. The leathery versions of the Sansevieria I have been discussing can be propagated two different ways. The easiest is to separate offsets — basically baby plants — put out at the base of an established plant. When the offset seems substantial enough, remove the entire plant from the pot, tease out the babies and repot mother and babies separately. 

The other method is through leaf cuttings. Take a long leaf and cut it into three-inch sections , remembering to keep each section oriented in the position it was growing. Using a moist  potting medium of half sand and half peat firmed down, insert the cutting with the bottom part wedged into the soil and cover the pot with a clear plastic bag to maintain a moist environment. Care must be taken that the bag does not have contact with the cuttings. Sansevieria cuttings, however, create new plants only from the center of the leaf cutting, so a plant with variegation along the edge will yield a totally green plant. To propagate variegated plants, one must use offsets.

But even if I haven’t convinced you to reconsider our ugly duckling plant, I was lucky enough to see a Sanseviera in bloom, and it knocked my socks off! I am sharing it with you in the above photograph.

Sanseviera, Green scene, Sura Jeselsohn

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