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These guys were like pros from a plant nursery, when concerning their treasure they were always very competent, authoritative, very disciplined, very punctual, very selfish, and extremely worried that someone don’t harm their green babies. The first thing they did when arriving to workplace was always to get there few minutes earlier to check their plants and then get to work. Once, when I got as a gift a beautiful huge Dieffenbachia which soon propagated too much in its pot few of my “green” colleagues fight over who would get these small ones to put them in new pots. They were pressing me every day until finally I let them do that and replant my Dieffenbachia which died shortly after they “helped” her grow better, but its offspring were living happily in their pots. Some of them were even put again in my office “to make it more beautiful and me less sad for I have lost my plant.”
Years passed until next time when I got my Dracaena Janet Craig Compacta – really beautiful specimen in a beautiful stylish blue-white pot. It was in 2000 when we were forming our first web team from the scratch. I organized big office for five of new staff and three of us to work together at the beginning and my secretary, a fengshui addict, bought a plant to each member to put on a special place at desk or window. The new staff were amazed, the place was too small and there was not enough room either for us, not to mention plants, but soon as we got to know each other better and finally got together well, we even named our plants and were living as happy greenish working family there.
Soon, we all became attached to our plants, not letting anyone harm them, although plants were living in awful conditions – lots of smoke and dust in the air, piles of paper hanging around, no regular watering, then sometimes unintentional “watering” with coffee, beer and even tequila if we were celebrating something in the office, then countless cases of accidental abuse, sitting on a plant covered by something, or almost tragic falling down from the desk/window, etc. as it was normal in a very dynamic office with 8 creative, workaholic people who were swinging from total catatonic steadiness in front of their monitors over loud articulations of their thoughts at the scratch board up to hilarious mood dancing all around sometimes with the very plant in hands after completing some challenging project phase. (Ah, those were the days, my friend...)
The point is that all plants survived, even my big Janet Craig who started dangerously to lean more and more towards the sunlight acting like Pisa tower for some reason. Then she had grown her little daughter in the same pot and that was about the time when our company plant watchers started visiting our big office to kindly negotiate with me who will take it away. I was not giving it for long time, but at the end I had to because I didn’t have ambition to wrap my life around taking care of two plants instead one. As we were frequently moving from the offices / floors / even locations (once it was 5 times for one year) I had more worries about my 10 boxes of books and documentation. I remember that one of our biggest moves took us to pack 35 huge cardboard boxes from our single office – all our equipment, books and yes – plants! – were going to other better premises and it took us whole weekend to pack, unpack and install everything in new offices. Of course we were only part of the team of about 80 people moving with over 150 computers, servers, library, administrations and – yes! Plants, of course! – to get to new offices where no furniture arrived yet except few small shelves. Those were the days, indeed.
Anyway, the plants survived that all as well as we do, but my plant was flown to someone else’s green flock and I found it few weeks later in the same beautiful pot equipped with strong holder to get her stem straight again. I was very proud that my Janet from Pisa has never straightened up and stayed leaned for all these years. Now she is at her 8th office location, still in the office leaning towards the window to the busy street downtown Belgrade. By my opinion she hasn’t changed at all, her leaves are slightly damaged at their ends and that’s all, she isn’t growing much, but her offspring did, so they are about the same size. Maybe, just maybe, I should take better care about her if only I knew how but I’m happy enough to see that she came quietly (into a scary and stressful working environment) and became a legend, at least for me.
Otherwise, I still feel strange about houseplants in general.
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Writer Profile
Zorica Vukovic
Zo belongs to a generation of average middle-aged intellectuals who grew up in a unique environment of the country known as the former Yugoslavia, which shrank in the last decade of the 20th century, divided into a few new states through civil war and finally dissolved into a union of states known as Serbia and Montenegro. She writes from her early youth, neither living of it, nor even living for it, just observing and meditating upon various issues of life and humanity. Her totemistic values are: love, creativity, ethics and the daily improvement of communications and actions on a global level.
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Comments
Deb Livingston | Aug 6th, 2004
really cool story!
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