Keeping the Peace Lily

I made a mandate a while back to keep a plant alive at work. Equipped with the proven prediction that this would be a challenge for me, I set out to landscape the office with a robust plant.

I ended up at a florist shop speaking in a foreign form of English trying to explain my predicament to a blank faced individual. I sense second languages aren’t a strong point of his.

The florist gestured at a scrawny Peace Lily. I read the tag instructions. Sounded like it could be robust.

The single petal bloomed and turned green almost immediately.

Each week I vigilantly watered it. Observed subtle changes in growth, or lack thereof.

Petals started to go yellowish. So much for being robust. Although even in the toughest of conditions – like the Sahara, nothing grows.

My coworker suggested that I get it plant food. I thought that water was enough?? As much as man cannot live on bread alone, apparently plants need more than water.

I read the silly little tag. Sure enough the plant needed fertilizer twice a month.

So I went out in search of plant food. Shortly after getting into the rhythm of feeding the plant its’ food, it grew 4 more petals. The petals shortly thereafter turned green.

I knew I was doing something wrong. Cacti have been a problem for me from time to time. Having a cacti farm was not going to be my calling in life. Nor was a landscaping business.

My coworker took one look at it and said, “Perhaps it needs more soil and a bigger pot.” She must have been right because when I came back from vacation the leaves had brown tips. The fact that my boss was gone on vacation and no one watered the plant while I was gone might have had something to do with the situation.

A diseased plant had gone from bad to worse.

My coworker sort of poked the yellow leaves and suggested a few problems that it might be experiencing. All of which required more gardening tools so I set out for the florist shop down the street on Friday. This time ensuring that I didn’t go to my previous stop.

I got there to find a startled florist when I explained the fact that I had by observation tortured our Peace Lily almost to extinction.

“How on earth do you kill a Peace Lily?” She asked while gathering bunches of babies breath for a purple bouquet. She was the expert so I figured that it would be best to listen to what she had to say.

I explained the situation.

“It’s almost impossible to kill those plants.” She said. “Have you been over watering it?”

I shrugged. I don’t think you could drown that plant. It absorbed a lot of water.

“Don’t let there be any access water. You don’t want the roots to rot.”

She then asked if I pinched off the flowers. Startled I realized therein lies my problem. I had not done that.

The clerk then pointed at the Peace Lily that she was in the process of selling. It was in worse shape than mine. This gave me satisfaction to know that my Peace Lily was not the ugliest to grace this earth.

All of the symptoms that my plant was experiencing were signs of distress in heat but it was fine and I had not killed it.

A spring in my step, I headed back to the office.

I gave the plant a manicure by pinching off the dead growth. I felt bad doing it but it was necessary to make room for the new growth.

I am now watching new buds unfold and to my relief I can keep at least one robust plant alive. It makes sense that by not pruning a plant it in fact hurts the organism. Useless energy is being wasted on a dead portion of the plant so it zaps the proper nutrients from the necessary parts of the plant hence creating discolouring at the very ends of the foliage.

Maybe I can truly become a botanist after all! Hydroponics here I come.