The little flower that could: Nurturing Ms. Daisy

Array

June 13, 2016: One of my lofty goals for the condo is to add and grow healthy and thriving plants. For years we’ve been reluctant to introduce living green things to our space because of a fear of unintentional herbicide. Bruce and I were self-professed brown thumbs, convinced that any attempt to bring a plant home would be to inherently kill it.

As Bruce would often joke when I would walk in with a plant, “Welcome. You have come to die.”

Despite this fear, I was determined to prove us wrong and insisted on bringing home plants of various kinds. Succulents. Lucky Bamboo. Tropical. You name it. After a year of hosting plants, I did an assessment of our green thumb progress in my “Checking in with the condo plants” post.

There was one plant that caught Bruce’s interest in particular – the orange gebera daisy plant. A beautiful flower plant I brought home in July 2015.

Although I like to name our plants, this one I didn’t bother to name because I was convinced that it would not stay long. Once the blooms withered and died, so too would the plant.

After the flowers died, I was prepared to throw away the plant. But Bruce stopped me. He urged me to replant it and vowed to take care of it. I did as he asked but explained to him that a flower will not return.

“Oh, flowers will come,” he replied. “I will see to that.”

So Bruce faithfully watered (and babied) the plant for months while I looked on with skepticism. Although I grumbled under my breath about his attention being fruitless, I secretly smiled over how devoted he became to that plant. And I observed with secret delight how he began to tend to our other plants (by now we’ve grown a nice collection). His attentiveness with watering and positioning the plants was quite unexpected.

And wonderful to watch.

But the daisy plant continued to be his favorite. Here’s his prized plant on March 29, 2016.

As the spring continued into April, May and then June, we continued to care for the plant. We would bring it out on the balcony to give it some fresh air and more sun. All the while, I was content to care for “Bruce’s green baby” as I did for my other green beauties.

Until one day…