[ Lost in the Landscape ]

no bad plants?

I’ve killed my share of plants when my pride in being able grow some­thing got in the way of com­mon sense. And then there are cases where the plant gets the seri­ous upper hand.

One exam­ple of the sec­ond sit­u­a­tion is of a pen­cil cac­tus, Euphor­bia tiru­calli. (Notwith­stand­ing its com­mon name it’s not a cac­tus at all, and instead belongs to the genus that brings you the perky hol­i­day poinsettia.)

Some­one gave John a lit­tle cut­ting. It looked cute. Why not put it in the ground? A lit­tle bush with pencil-shaped leaves would be fun.

Sev­eral years later its cute­ness wore off as it matured into a seri­ous large shrub, ten feet tall. At some point John tried to prune it and got some sap into his eye. There are reports of tem­po­rary blind­ness for at least three days as a result of the sap, in addi­tion to fre­quent reports of extreme skin irri­ta­tion. For­tu­nately John’s sit­u­a­tion wasn’t so dire, but it was extremely painful. That wiped out almost all of the plant’s cute­ness points, and when its roots started to push over a retain­ing wall, that was it. It had to go.

I tend to be gen­er­ous in my eval­u­a­tions of the value of var­i­ous plants. There are spe­cific niches in spe­cific ecosys­tems for every species. When pulled out of an appro­pri­ate con­text and thrown into an grossly inap­pro­pri­ate one, how­ever, plants can respond in two ways. Either they can die–not good for the plant. Or they can take over the way this euphor­bia did–not good for the new envi­ron­ment or grow­ing situation.

Last Fall I got out the pruners, lop­pers and ax, cov­ered every bit of exposed skin that I could, then started to take the thing down. The plant eas­ily filled up the back of the pickup with wet suc­cu­lent plant parts ooz­ing sticky, milky juices.

The local land­fill has a greens recy­cling pro­gram. But they took one look at the evil load and directed us to the dump side of the facil­ity. As a result, a cou­ple mil­len­nia down the road, some archae­ol­o­gist will try to make sense of our cul­ture by pick­ing through a pile of bro­ken wash­ing machines, rot­ted sofas, dis­col­ored pizza boxes and pieces of a mys­te­ri­ous plant with pow­ers to blind and incapacitate.

Nine months later the plant is seri­ously set back, though not entirely dead. My energy flagged before I could get the stump out of the ground, and every now and then the plant tries to come back to life. I’ve since seen shade-tree sized spec­i­mens of the species in West Hol­ly­wood, so I’m con­vinced I got to the plant before it was too late. I’ll just keep at the regrowth until the plant decides to give up the ghost.

Halfway across the yard, in a lit­tle clay pot, sits another vari­ant of this species, the red form that’s been given the clonal name ‘Rosea,’ and is com­monly known as “sticks of fire.” It’s sup­posed to be a lot less vig­or­ous. It’s not sup­posed to get much over six feet tall. It’s sup­posed to lack the same amount of chloro­phyll and have less of that life force than its green big brother. But I’m skep­ti­cal. That plant isn’t going to get to live out­side of its pot. Ever.

Talk­ing to one of the mem­bers of the local cac­tus and suc­cu­lent soci­ety, he thought that was for the best. The red vari­ant hasn’t been around for more than a few years. No one knows its pos­si­ble even­tual size. As far as its even­tual sup­posed six foot height? “I’d be very skep­ti­cal,” he said.

Behind him, planted in the ground just a few dozen yards away, was one of the red forms of the plant. It was already five feet tall.

June 25 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Euphorbia tirucalli • pencil cactus • sticks of fire | 3 Comments »