The Family Tree

              By Elaine Viets

Your family tree may go way back, but mine has more mileage. In twenty years, we’ve put nearly 2,000 miles on our family tree.

Our tree is a ficus. When we bought a house in St. Louis, it sat in the living room, daring us to move it. The six-foot tree stayed by the window. It’s tough. When we moved to Washington DC, the Missouri ficus was crammed in a moving van for 850 miles. It survived another long haul from DC to Fort Lauderdale – 1040 miles.

The movers cursed that ficus as they lugged it up to our third-floor Florida apartment. "Lady, here we trim these things with Weed Wackers."

The tree kept growing.

It shed most of its leaves during a two-year exile at our tiny beach apartment. But when we moved to our Fort Lauderdale condo, the ficus grew like a weed. This winter, it was eight feet tall and eight feet around. It outgrew its pot.

How was I going to transplant a hedge? I delayed, dithered and watered the tree until its leaves yellowed and it stank like a swamp.

I had to save it. That tree was family. A bit of a stick, maybe, but it never talked politics or asked when I’d get a real job.

Our local nursery owner refused to transplant the tree. "It’s rootbound and waterlogged," he said. "You need to know if it will live first. Put it out in the sun and drill holes in the pot."

My husband Don and I dragged the eight-by-eight tree onto our balcony. The air turned blue as we cursed. As least we insulted the tree and not each other. I swept up a trash bag full of leaves in the livingroom.

The holes in the pot were easier. It’s foam that looks like stone. When I poked holes around the bottom, dark smelly water trickled off our balcony.

After the water drained, the tree was down to a handful of leaves. I asked our landscaper friend, Tim, to look at it.

Then I ordered a lightweight planter the size of a table for the ailing ficus, and found an 8-foot areca palm for the living room. The areca would take the place of the ficus in my home, but not my heart.

Right before the transplant, the condo maintenance man pounded on our door.  "What’s leaking on your balcony?" he asked.

I looked down. My heart fell seven floors. Tree water had turned the balconies below dark brown. Tannin stains.

My neighbors didn’t deserve that.

Friday morning, I met Tim at the nursery. The areca palm looked light and feathery standing with its fellows. But on the condo elevator, the palm seemed big enough to swallow Tim and me both.

Tim covered the balcony with a dropcloth and trimmed away the dead wood. "The ficus has a 75 percent chance of survival," he said.

Tim was a wrestler in school, and he needed his skills to manhandle the ailing ficus and the new palm. After two hours, Tim looked like he’d been mud wrestling.

But the family tree is recuperating on the balcony and the new palm is reigning in the living room.

I spent the weekend experimenting with ways to remove tannin stains from painted concrete. Conventional cleaners didn’t work. The next steps involved rubber gloves, wire brushes and acid.

Until my handy friend Karen suggested hydrogen peroxide. We had some   in the medicine cabinet. "You have to use it at night," she said. "It evaporates in sunlight. That’s why it’s in a brown bottle."

I soaked a paper towel with peroxide and left it on a test section. The next morning, the stain was gone. It worked. Peroxide was cheap, easy and environmentally safe. The condo association won’t have to repaint the balconies. My neighbors below may forgive me if I give them each a bottle of wine.                                

I wanted to thank my smart friend Karen. She likes ficus trees.

"Please let me send you a six-foot ficus," I said.

For some reason, she said no.

Comments

[Molly]

You treat your trees nearly as well as I do my dog!

[Elaine Viets]

Pets and plants make a house feel like a home, Molly. And I don't have to walk the tree.

[Storyteller Mary]

I will admit that you are a better plant hostess than I am. I enjoy plants, and they clean the air as well as adding color. However, if they are too difficult, I let them go, sometimes with regret, as I did with the big citrus plant from orange and grapefruit seeds my great nieces and nephews planted after breakfast. It got big when I started putting it out on my sunny balcony in the summer. It didn't thrive after the move, too much shade from the big hickory trees. I finally let it stay outside, knowing that it would be its last year.
The general rule in my house is watering once a week, and the plants that stay are the ones who enjoy that routine . . .

[Marcia Talley]

I've love your ficus! It's a survivor. My role model!!

[Elaine Viets]

I think, Marcia and Mary, that the ficus became a symbol of myself -- we'd both survived hard times and now, by heaven, I'm going to bring it back.
Don doesn't care about it the same way. To him, a vegetable is a vegetable, in a pot or on a plate.