A plant I cannot kill

I frowned, pressing my fingers into the soft, dark soil.

“They look a bit droopy, don’t they?” asked my husband, unhelpfully.

“Yes, but they’re still damp,” I replied, though concerned about these slightly sad looking pepper plants in the windowsill. One of our neighbours had made the potentially fatal error of asking me to care for her pot plants while she was sailing in the fjord. I dearly hoped I could keep them alive until her return.

One might say that – though I love plants and I love the idea of being good at gardening – at best my abilities in this realm are inconsistent. On the one hand, we have some splendid looking young chilli plants at present, their broad dark leaves basking in the almost endless summer sunlight pouring through our living room windows. But it deteriorates from there. The great grandfather of these young plants is the enormous chilli plant, over six foot tall and towering slightly menacingly over the back of our sofa. This one is about three years old, a bit ragged and scruffy around the edges, but still doggedly producing fruit. Nearby, a similarly elderly avocado plant hunches in the corner. The avocado has been raised with great care by my husband – the one survivor of a suite of seeds tenderly perched in water for weeks until that one delicate shoot appeared, watched over as it was transplanted, and now firmly established. But unlike friends’ avocado plants, with their strong woody stems, artistically interwoven, and with broad silky leaves reaching out in umbrella-like canopies, our avocado slumps forlornly in its corner, its spindly limbs draping brown-edged leaves over the precipice of its pot, one or two more buoyant branches reaching toward the light. And then there is the herb garden, which started well but which has descended into a chaotic mess of rangy stems, thin on leaves and slumped in dismay. It is fair to say that inconsistency would be generous. At worst, one might alternatively say that I am a harbinger of death to our photosynthetic friends.

This is why I like this plant. It is rose root, native to the Arctic. Others like it for a range of excellent reasons. For example, it tastes good in tea and makes a fine schnapps. Some people simply pull them up and eat them, though they have a slightly bitter taste. But the reason I like them is that they appear to be immortal. This one was dug up by my husband about three years ago and plonked into a pot plant on our front deck. There it has sat ever since. Not once have I watered it. Not once has the soil been changed or tended to in any way. In the pouring rain it floods. In dry summer weeks it dessicates. In the winter, it freezes solid and is covered – for months – in a few inches of snow. And inexorably, in the spring, its dry, browned leaves begin to colour again and its delicate yellow flowers bloom once more. This is a plant that I cannot kill.