Thanks to (actually no thanks) this past winter’s hard freezes here in Florida, we lost many a plant. Our lime tree included. The above variegated bougainvillea was also lost. We can’t seem to find it. Or maybe it passed away. I wonder, where did it pass to?
Post death, do we wish for plants to rest in peace? What rests? What could be “in peace” post mortem?
With humans, and perhaps beloved pets (living beings we had relationships with and wish that their being continued in some form, so as to maintain the relationship?) we wish for them to R.I.P.
While the sentiment today is truly for peace, in the past that may not have been the full case. Sometimes the wish may have been for the deceased to stay resting: to not bother the living with tormenting visions.
In either case, I guess it’s not appropriate for me to wish that “departed” plants (where do they go?) I have known and valued now experience an oblivion of bliss. While it would certainly beat an oblivion infested with parasitic insects, or some other vegetative hell I can imagine, were I a plant, I am skeptical of the notion that a plant knows suffering or a lack thereof. And so it dissolves without pain. And I am left with nothing for me to direct my thoughts to.
May 10th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
I have plants who have gone to that Great Greenhouse In The Sky whom I miss greatly and think about regularly. There was the huge, misshapen rubber tree I inherited from a more experienced psychiatric therapy provider when she took a better job. As a single post-grad, I drug it, with help from friends and family, from apartment to apartment for years. I got interested in plant grafting once and committed a strange surgery on its thick, pithy trunk; I was trying to graft on another type of plant entirely. That rubber tree forgave me and I felt like a heel when I had to send it on to another foster family. That was forty years ago. R.I.P., Rubber Tree. (Makes as much sense as most of the obituaries I read in the local papers.)
Only you could have written this post, Andrew. Hooray!
May 11th, 2010 at 11:59 am
Thanks, Nance.
I wonder, while we can be fond of “special” plants, can we also hold a grudge against others? What’s the range of emotions we can experience in relation to plants?
Has anyone every assaulted a maple, married an elm?