Love Jade

by Sara Kuebbing

I will share an embarrassing secret with Plant Love Stories. One of my favorite movies is How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. My love for this RomCom is in part nostalgic; my college roommates and I watched this film too many times to admit in writing. It is in part because I adore Kate Hudson; she is charming and funny and beautiful. And, it is in part because you sometimes just need a movie with a "silly premise and predictable script" (Critics' Consensus at Rotten Tomatoes.com).

Most important to this story, however, is that How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days gave the world the term "love fern." For those of you unfamiliar with the premise of the film, it revolves around a classic comedic plot device: the mix-up. The protagonist (Kate Hudson) spends most of the film attempting to sabotage her new relationship as research for her upcoming "How To…" column. Conversely, her new beau, (Matthew McConaughey) is attempting to make Hudson fall in love with him to demonstrate to his colleagues that he is a master of romance.

The Love Fern signifies one of Hudson's ploys to sink the relationship. On Day Three, Hudson introduces The Love Fern as an undying symbol of their love. By Day Seven the Love Fern is no more. Hudson's theatrical despair about the death of her Love Fern has been resurrected and is now immortal through many, many internet memes and its own entry in Urban Dictionary.

Even in the best of circumstances, caring for an indoor fern is total nonsense. They require too much pampering: frequent watering, the perfect temperature, ample humidity, no drafts, the perfect light. Thus, the perfect plot plant in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, but not for someone looking for low-maintenance household greenery.

I started collecting houseplants in college. Instead of buying plants from a garden center, I poached my plants from unsupervised locations around campus. I surreptitiously clipped a tendril from a massive Pothos sitting in the college dining hall, dubbed him George, and grew him for months in a plastic water bottle. I clandestinely detached sprouting spiderettes from the mama Spider Plant in my dorm's lobby. I secretly dug up a few pups from a large aloe sitting in the windowsill of my classroom. I found it intriguing that with just a little water and some soil these small pieces of a plant could grow into their own respectably-sized house plant.

My favorite house plant acquisition thus far is my Love Jade. While visiting my (then) boyfriend, who was attending graduate school many states away, I plucked a single leaf from an enormous Jade plant from the school's library. Embracing the hilarity of the idea of the Love Fern, I christened the single leaf our Love Jade, shoved the leaf into an empty yogurt container with the dregs of a bag of potting soil, and thought it would be a long-shot if this single leaf could survive the month. That single leaf did not only survive, it thrived. As my boyfriend, and now husband, and I relocated our households, our Love Jade traveled with us. It survived trunks and back seats during interstate moves from Vermont to Connecticut, back north to Vermont, south to Tennessee, north again to Connecticut, and just last week, westward to Pennsylvania. It has been repotted countless times from its first modest plastic home to its current decorative purple-glazed ceramic pot.

My Love Jade, as well as many of my other poached plants, are still with me today. My aloe sits at my desk. My spider plant in my bathroom. My Pothos on top of my fridge in my kitchen. Our Jade in our entry hallway. They have adopted friends, like an African violet I flew from Georgia to Vermont because my father orphaned it before his cross-country move to Oregon. I have Christmas cacti and Amaryllis that my Argentine friends left behind when they moved home. My plants are no Love Ferns. They are hardy. They can go weeks without water. They can withstand a little chewing from obstinate cats. They now will live through grubby baby fingers ripping their leaves. Some are a bit haggard looking, with gangly vines and chewed leaf tips, but that that just adds to their character.

Each plant in my menagerie has its own Origin Story. Each plant reminds me of people or places from my past. But, unlike some nostalgia, I get to move my plants with me wherever I go. They also let me share the love with others. Many of my pilfered plants have donated pups or spiderettes or tendrils or leaves to family and friends wishing to start their own collection. Please let me know if you would like to find your own "love plant", I would be eager to share the love.

Sara "sassafras" Kuebbing is a 2016 Smith Fellow and co-founder of Plant Love Stories. She recently moved to Pittsburgh, PA and is looking for a friend who would like to swap some house plants.

#Jade #Movies #Collecting #College #Boyfriend

Two siblings, one tree, and one broken arm

by Bonnie McGill

I’m telling you he was throwing sticks at me and wouldn’t stop. So I did what any little sister would do when verbal communication fails to bring about a change in your older brother’s behavior: give them a little shove. That’ll get their attention. And it sure did.

It was August 1995, think President (Bill) Clinton, Toy Story and Garth Brooks. I was 11 and my brother, Tim, was 13. (The photos at left were taken in ~1987 and 2016.) We had been climbing trees together all our lives in western Pennsylvania. That day we were up in the silver maple tree in what is now our dad’s backyard. At the time this was a house my parents rented out. The tree was (and still is) a fine specimen of good old Acer saccharinum: DBH (diameter at breast height) about 1.5 feet, nearly two stories tall, at the edge of the yard next to a small creek, and a beautiful show of color in the fall. Sounds so tranquil, doesn’t it?

Well not that day. When I shoved Tim to get him to stop throwing sticks at me it was never my intention to knock him off balance so that he would fall about 15 feet to the ground and break his arm…but that’s what happened. I don’t even remember climbing down the tree, but I clearly remember standing over him as he shouted and writhed in pain. When he opened his eyes from his tight grimace and saw my face he shouted, “YOU SON OF A [BLEEP]”! And me, being the oh-so-literal smart aleck that I am, said quite calmly, “No, I’m not a son of a [bleep], I’m a [bleep].” In full transparency, I may have even wagged my finger. Oh I can hardly imagine the fury he felt toward me at that moment, but it probably sounded something like this. He just shouted, “Go. Get. Mom!” which I did in a flash. We piled in our faux-wood-paneled 1980 Buick station wagon and took him to the emergency room lickity split.

Fast forward about 20 years. This is one of a small collection of touchstone memories my brother and I cherish. When he introduces me to a friend, he is so proud to tell them what a terrible sister I am because I pushed him out of a tree and broke his arm. I think it helps level the playing field, i.e., even though I have a Ph.D. and escaped our Rust Belt town, I’m still just a pesky little sister. And it’s something we laugh about the few times we are together and not yelling at each other. You see, since 1995 many things have changed: our parents divorced and sold the farm, meaning our childhood home and the creek and woods we grew up in belong to someone else now, my dad now lives in the house with said maple tree, Tim served in the ARMY in Iraq in 2007-2008, and we as people and the lives we live could hardly be any more painfully different. But it’s these few, cherished, shared experiences that, no matter how distant our two planets seem to be, will always bring us back together—to that maple tree at dad’s house in the summer of 1995.

Bonnie is a scientist and artist who now lives on the prairie in Kansas with her beloved old dog, Bowie. Bonnie is also a co-founder of Plant Love Stories and created our logo!

#Children #Tree #Family #Pennsylvania #Siblings #Maple

Low Elevation Alpine Love

by Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie

I fell in love with alpine plants at the bottom of the mountain. In college I worked as an environmental educator at a backcountry hut in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Many of these huts are “high mountain,” perched just at treeline for beautiful hikes through alpine communities with Sound-of-Music-style panoramic views of open summits.

My hut, Zealand Falls, was not a high mountain hut. Our elevation was 2700’ and we were surrounded by lowland trees like paper birch and striped maple. But, Zealand Falls had waterfalls. During the lull of midday — the post-breakfast quiet when all of last night’s guests had hiked on to higher peaks, and that night’s guests were still trudging up the trail — I spent hours wading up the Zealand River, lounging in the rills, climbing the falls.

Little clumps of butter-cup-yellow flowers clung to the moss-covered rocks in the middle of the falls: mountain avens. In New Hampshire, mountain avens belong to much higher elevations; this rare plant with a truly weird post-glacial distribution is endemic to the White Mountain alpine zone and coastal Nova Scotia. Mountain avens are supposed to be high mountain hut plants, not inland valley forest plants.

They didn’t grow on the banks of the river, or anywhere in the forest around the hut, just the waterfall. They seemed to know what I knew: the falls were a cool retreat from the July heat and humidity. Living with mountain avens, and sharing their waterfall microclimate for a summer, made me feel like I had a secret alpine plant “pet.”

Years later, I started graduate school and joined a research project that brought me back to alpine plant plots around the high mountain huts in the White Mountains. But, I always made a point to hike back to Zealand Falls and see my original “alpine” loves.

Caitlin "mountain aven" McDonough MacKenzie is a 2017 Smith fellow and a founder of Plant Love Stories. She uses fossil pollen to study plants of the past alpine plant communities in Maine. You can follow Caitlin in Maine at @CaitlinInMaine

#Mountain #College #Alpine #Maine