So I was perusing the trees at Lowe's, oohing and aaaahing over all the fun that I could have, when I spied a beauty of a specimen just waiting for me to take it home. It was small, and bent and twisted in almost painful ways. I loved it. Immensely. Right up until I saw the $80 price tag. I am the Queen of Cheap, and practicality raised its ugly head, telling me to just walk away already. I tried. I really did. As I was taking a step away my eyes lingered on it's beauty, and then I saw it. A branch of that beautimus tree was snapped off and dangling. It detracted from the beauty of the thing, and because I'm a gardener at heart, I reached out and broke it off so as to avoid the unsightly. A tree has to look it's best to sell itself, and dead, hanging branches won't make a good impression.
As I was holding that twig in my hand, wondering where a trash can would be (because I'm a mom, and we never just toss things onto the ground), Becky said, "you should plant that and see if it would grow." Much as I loved that idea (and wished I would have thought of it on my own), I told her that it wouldn't work because the branch was dead. At the break, the inside of the twig was brown. Never a good sign. But in order to teach, I showed her how to check for signs of life. "See, if you use your fingernail and scrape the skin off just a bit, a live tree will be green underneath. Something dead like this will be brown." Except that dead twig was green when I scraped back some bark.
My heart started racing, as did my mind. First of all, I had a live cutting off an $80 tree that I muchly coveted right there in my hand. Secondly, I needed to get it into some growth hormone STAT. Thirdly, did I just steal? I mean, I had no intention of taking that branch to grow. I was just trying to help out by making things look tidy. Should I just throw it away? Should I ask an employee to salvage it? Should I tape it back onto the tree? Should I run, screaming, from the building?
So now I have a stick in a flower pot in the middle of my dining room table. From what I understand, its chances of growing are pretty good. Someday, I may or may not have a walking stick tree in my landscape. And I may or may not have stolen it.
4 comments:
LOVE it. And no, I can't stop laughing at your guilty conscience. I'm in the "it's all about intent" category in this type of situation. That said, I'm not going to nurseries looking for broken off branches ;)
We are SO alike. I hope you can continue to enjoy looking at it and think of it as a salvage, not a steal (they would have trampled that twig all day until it was swept up later and thrown into the garbage).
Maybe you could hook up a "tree cam" so we can watch the growth with you? ;-)
It is worth a try! However, for a minute, I thought the marshmallow stick was the stick you brought home with you!
Those trees are cool looking. $80 is a big chunk of change. Hopeful your non-stolen branch grows fast for ya.
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