May 9, 2016

Our Love Plant Didn’t Die

Martie Big Creek Farmhouse Remodel bulbs, Calla lily, love plant 10 Comments

You may or may not have read my post about Coach’s and my anniversary a few weeks ago. To refresh your memory, click here.  I mentioned that he gave me a Calla Lily plant,a love plant, and that there was more to the story. There is. This is not the first Calla Lily Coach has ever given me. The first one was our original love plant.

Except, we lost it. We literally cannot find that plant. Our love plant didn’t die, it just got misplaced.

Our Original Love Plant

How do you lose a plant, you may ask?  We’ve been wondering the same exact thing.  Coach bought me a beautiful purple Calla Lily on our first anniversary, sixteen years ago.

He also bought me some chocolates and a few cheap pairs of earrings, both of which disappeared as quickly as my waistline seemed to do within a few months of getting married.  But the plant, our love plant, would live on for years to come.  We planted that beautiful Lily in our front yard and enjoyed it’s radiating, purple love.

Until our dog dug it up.  Meet Luc.

Yes, he was precious.  He was cute, sweet and snuggly.

He was also a ring-tail-tooter!  This little bundle of energy was our first “child”, and he was a challenge!

When Luc dug up our love plant, I was pretty upset. Coach wasn’t home at the time, and I went out and collected all the little bulbs that Luc had scattered all around our front yard, and I cried a little over the loss of my beautiful love plant.  Calla Lilies kind of disappear in the fall and winter, and pop back up in spring, so since it was late fall, Luc thought he’d found some fun little balls to play with, I guess. (Luc got himself run over by a car, which answered the age old question, “what’s he gonna do with a car if he catches one?”  We grieved his loss terribly, and he’s buried in the back yard of that empty lot where our first house was.  You can read more about that here.)

When Coach (who knows something about plants and flowers, especially compared to me) came home that day, I told him what had happened and he reassured me that our love plant would be fine, and I should just re-plant the bulbs. I did that the very next day, except I decided it would be fun to separate all the little bulbs and have a whole bunch of Calla Lilies!

That next Spring when all these tall, skinny shoots of Calla Lily started popping up all over the flower bed, Coach asked, trying not to laugh, “What did you do to our love plant?”  I explained that I thought I’d have more plants that way, and he just patted me on the back, dug them back up, and put them all together again.  He was too kind.

Our Love Plant on the Move

When we moved from that house to our second house, Coach dug up my love plant and put it in a big pot of dirt so we could take it with us. Sadly, we lived in house #2 for over a year before we planted it! What’s sadder is that we actually forgot about it. Coach was coming out of the garage one day and noticed a green shoot sticking out of a big pot…he brought it out to the patio and we stared in amazement at our love plant, sprouting up through the dirt after sitting there in the garage for over a year.  We poked it  into the ground, and it came back and bloomed every year for the 9 years we lived there.

Then we moved here, to Big Creek. It was late November, so the Calla Lily wasn’t a plant at the time, just bulbs.  Coach dug them up and….that’s the last he saw if it.  I kept asking him, “where’s our love plant?”  He kept saying, “I know where it is, don’t worry.”  He was lying to me.  He couldn’t find it anywhere.  He just knew he put those bulbs in a coffee can and that he’d be able to put his hands right on it as soon as it was time to put it in the ground, but after searching the place over a zillion times, he finally accepted that our love plant was not to be found.

That’s why I got the new one!  Then, for Mother’s Day, Coach and the girls gave me a beautiful, big, blue pot to put it in. This way we can move the pot indoors in the winter months and keep this love plant alive forever, too.

Here’s the thing…I don’t think our original love plant is dead.  That plant has been through too much, and I believe that somewhere, there is a coffee can with tall, skinny, green shoots sticking out of it, and maybe even some pretty purple blooms.  Maybe it fell out of the truck in the move, and it’s growing in a ditch somewhere.  Maybe it’s under our shop porch, or still in the ground at house #2, because Coach just thought he dug it up.  Who knows?  But I don’t believe it’s dead.

I will nurture my replacement love plant, and I will keep it forever. And, maybe someday, we’ll find our first love plant and they can share the big blue pot.

X,O,X,O,   Martie

This post is linked up with Over the Moon and Wonderful Wednesday!