Roughly 20 years ago, I received a schefflera plant and a beautiful cranberry red ceramic pot as a wedding anniversary gift. They both have been with me in every place I have lived ever since. In all that time, the plant has grown leggy, spindly, and awkward. Turns out, had I known, I should have been pruning it all along. Considering it now reaches out a full arms-length from the pot, on those hard, tree trunk like branches, there is no time like the present to start pruning. Naturally, the first place I went was to YouTube to see how to propagate what I cut. I've been watching some Swedish guy for an hour now, and he knows everything about these plants. Following his directions, I have now snipped four cuttings and put them in water. If they survive, I may end up trimming off the entire rest of the viable plant, pulling out the old root mass, and starting over fresh in new potting soil.
Today was the day we moved the ficus tree outside for the season. It's another plant that has been with us since the dawn of time (it was a wedding gift). It takes up a ton of real estate in the living room, and I always look forward to its outdoor season. We have pruned it back a few times, but they are such melodramatic, fragile trees, I don't like to do that often. I wonder whether this same Swedish guy has thoughts about them.
I spent nearly all day rearranging the corner where the ficus had been all winter. I was scooping up the bushel of leaves it dropped that were hard to reach, and deep cleaning things that had been inaccessible all that time, like baseboards and the south end of the picture window. With all the hard work outside we have been doing, we kind of let tidying up inside slide, so I did a fair piece of that too. I stopped often to stand at the front window and admire my collection of flowers. It's a lovely feeling to do that. It's like being hugged by color. I wore myself out moving furniture and plants that are taller than I am, but at the very end of the day I managed to go out and do a light watering of all the pots. The Korean lilac is in bloom, and between it and all the alyssum I've tucked in everywhere, it smells wonderful out there.
Okay, Mr Swedish Plant Guy, what about Sansevieria? Am I treating those right?
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