A Boy and his Houseplant (long and probably annoying)

**"Lenadams Dorris" lenadams@netnevada.net>**

Hello all,

The following is a rambling remembrance (with associated questions) I
bring to GWL because the assembled knowledge here is vast indeed (and
because no one elsewhere had a clue what I am talking about). It's a
story of a boy and his house plant, and an adult's search to find the
plant again for the boy he once was, sort of (I am both the boy and the
adult...go figure). I originally wrote it out as a plain email note, but
it grew so long and florid I copied it into a text file for attachment,
thus saving the eyes of the less than interested. I then put it back in
the body of the email because I recalled that some of the lists I'm on
disallow  attachments, even text files, and I don't remember which ones.
I tried to find a GWL FAQ, but all I could find was a page at
[lists.ibiblio.org] with "listinfo" for "gardenwriters", which didn't
address the ethics of attachment. As a recent list member, I can only
hope that my posting this is not out of line. In an attempt to be
helpful I have typed a little dividing line made of asterisks before
which one can hit DELETE. It is meant merely as a convenience for those
whose curiosity has not been sufficiently aroused as of this
sentence--those who determined early on to plunge forward to their next
waiting email message are no doubt already gone from here without the
assistance of asterisks.

If, miraculously, you find yourself willing to risk disappointment,
annoyance--or perhaps just simple boredom...to you I bow deeply and
sweep my arm in invitation...

************ the "time to hit DELETE" line ************

Once upon a time, back in the pre-digital 1960s and 70s, there was a
lovely little plant that could be found in every houseplant store, even
in the rack of tiny two-inch "tropicals" that lurked by the magazine
section in almost every Safeway, A&P and Winn Dixie. It was familiarly
known as "Indoor Oak" and as an excitable child of eight I discovered it
among the other plants in a 25 cent 2 inch wide pot. Having learned the
technique from several sticky-mouthed candy fiends who lived in my
house, I begged my mother to indulge me in my particular craving and
purchase it for me, along with a similarly small and cheap little Hedera
and a seedling rubber tree that somewhat resembled a cross between a
cocktail umbrella and one of those sandwich toothpicks topped with fuzzy
green cellophane.

The tiny oakoid soon became my favorite plant; when it outgrew the
four-inch coconut shell pot I'd moved it into upon first bringing it
home, I for some reason decided that it needed to be planted directly
into the soil of my family home's entrance courtyard. The courtyard was
sheltered from wind and from too much sun, and many hardy but
tropical-appearing plants were growing there happily. I never considered
that my little plant might be of tropical origin and that it might never
thrive unprotected in the ground (our corner of the desert was at the
time listed as USDA Zone 8; a better statistical base has caused it to
be   upgraded to the slightly less frigid zone 9a). No one intervened,
because even at that tender age I was showing a frightening
horticultural aptitude, and that was just as well. My outdoor "Indoor
Oak" didn't know that it should have been unhappy, either, and once free
to spread its roots it quickly grew--into a willowy, open specimen of
oakliness measuring some two by three feet.

Although nine years later my Safeway shrublet had become a densely
handsome "accent plant" soaring almost four feet, it mysteriously
disappeared in the summer (the summer I left for college) I left for
college. My newly developing forensic skills in tow, I spent the
Thanksgiving holiday searching for evidence. Soon, despite her protests,
I knew what had happened: my plant had been a victim of mother's famous
"care regimen", a Torquemada-like regime that involved sharp shiny
shears, jugs of salty cyan-blue plant food and something she called
"deadheading". It turned out that many other brave plants were to follow
in falling, but their lives were not taken in vain; no, seeing the
damage done made the impending post-collegiate break with home and
family that much easier.

As I said, this "Indoor Oak" took the form of a dwarf shrub with wiry,
woody, mostly unbranched reddish brown stems lightly clothed in leathery
alternate two to three inch persistent leaves of the darkest green,
which were arrayed with prominent veins and the gentle lobes of a white
oak (as opposed to the prickly lobes of a red oak). It never flowered
for me, but it never froze out, either, despite its apparently tropical
origins. Of course my knowledge was limited to knowing that it had been
sold in a rack with other "tropicals". It didn't even have a tag; I knew
its name only because one of my parent's friends called it that, and she
of course didn't know the botanical name. 

When I was 12 I bought my first precious copy of L.H. Bailey's Hortus
Second, used, for a mere $10. The first thing I looked up was the
oakster, which of all of the many kean-o plants I had by then collected
remained dearest to my heart (speaking of which...by then the 2-inch pot
of heart-leafed English Ivy purchased four years earlier had grown to
cover the entire front of our north-facing house...dark, dense and at
least 300 feet square.)

Mr. Bailey's tome finally gave a real name to my treasure: Nicodemia
diversifolia (Lam.), of the Logania tribe and native to the Himalayas'
misty eastern foothills. That explained its apparent hardiness, for many
plants from that region can stand as much as ten degrees of frost. Ever
since that long ago Thanksgiving, when I returned from the temples of
learning only to discover a heartbreaking absence, I've tried to find
another Nepalese Nicodemia to replace the one that was lost. Of course,
by then the plant had gone out of fashion, as so many plants regularly
do in this age when even nurserymen must compete with ill-bred
celebrities for the attention of potential purchasers. Through all these
years I still sometimes think of my grade school companion plant, and
when the opportunity arises I visit greenhouse growers across the globe
to question them about Mr. Nicodemus' green namesake. The story was
always the same: no one ever had it, and only a few even knew what I was
babbling about. It was odd that when the successor to Hortus Second was
published in the late 1970s, it referred the entire Nicodemia genus to
Buddleja, but along the way dropped any mention of my particular
species.

The aforementioned forensic skills helped me to discover that the plant
*should* have been called Buddleja indica all along, in accordance with
the rules of nomenclatural precedence. Thus armed I began to spot my
quarry on the occasional grower's list. It seems that in the manner of
bell bottom pants and heavy plastic eyeglasses, the "Indoor Oak" may be
poised for a new season in the world of hortifashion. Just this week I
found the plant on two lists, one French, the other American. Even so,
it apparently is not yet time for me to reinstigate my worshipful affair
with this fine Buddleja, a marvel in a genus of marvels (and why, oh why
did nomenclature's chronological lottery have to bless the memory of
awkward and homespun Mr. Buddle rather than poor Mr. Nicodemus, whose
name now adorns a mere accident, a taxonomic blunder?) You see, every
time I prepare to purchase a plant, having seen it in a catalog after so
long, it is either sold out or unavailable due to thrips, water molds,
flea beetles or, worst of all, generic "crop failure". So be it--I've
got it in my sights now, and there's little doubt that soon--very
soon--I will be reunited with my childhood pride and joy (or a
reasonably close genetic facsimile thereof). This time, too, it will get
pride of place in the open ground, where it will be showered daily with
all of the love, humus and fertilizer it requires to overcome its
shyness of bloom. All of this just so I can finally experience the
mysterious panicles for which I have waited now thirty-three years.

I say mysterious because I've never seen them, and no one else I've
encountered seems to have seen them either. Neither can I find in my
library pictures of the flowers, or of the plant's leaves, form or even
of its dried up old seed heads. Two hours with Google, Yahoo! And
AltaVista (such names!) turned up no photos or drawings, and almost no
textual data either. There are tens of billions of pages on the web
today, making it a research appliance that can instantaneously return
the most obscure facts about anything--anything that is, except the
"Indoor Oak" by any of its names. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that
unlike most of our garden plants, this one has accumulated at least ten
unique binomials in the mere two hundred years it has been in
cultivation. Of course I searched both in books and on the web under
every single name: Nicodemia diversifolia, N. grandifolia, N.
hermanniana, N. isleana, N. rondoletiaeflora, N. rufescens, Buddleja
loniceroides, B. nepalensis, B. rondoletiaeflora, and, finally (and
correctly, at least for now) Buddleja indica.

It's a long story without much payoff. The reason I brought it to this
online college of authors was that I had hope that alone among the heaps
of useless internet mailing lists, communities and user's groups, this
one might have in its ranks at least one who is familiar with the plant
I've been babbling about. It would be nice to know if anyone is familiar
with a grower who might have, currently in stock, one of these plants.
And it would also be nice if it should turn out that someone on this
list has photos of the plant, in flower or not. I don't need the photos
for publication, at least not now, just for my own plant diary. When I
was young I could get obsessive about the things I loved, especially
plants, but I never felt obsessed. It seems to be, at least for me, a
condition peculiar to middle-age, for I find myself getting wrapped
around odd pieces of unfinished business from earlier in my life. I
don't always try to actually finish the business, but I often find
myself writing about it. This case is a little of both, plus generous
dollops of nostalgia for things gone and insistence upon a sort of
restorative circularity that spins around us just waiting to be grabbed
hold of.

So now, having exhausted the metaphorical ribbon of my metaphorical
typewriter, I can ask the simple one line question that, under other
circumstances, I could have posted in the place of this ridiculous
indulgence:

Does anyone here know anything about, or have photographs or drawings of
a once-common houseplant known as "Indoor Oak"?

Thanks...and I promise to read the posts of any middle-aged list members
who find themselves similarly preoccupied, er obsessed.

Len 

P.S. The third two-inch Safeway plant I bought all those years ago, the
Ficus elastica, grew to be a ten foot tall monster in a whisky barrel in
the courtyard with a protective overhang. It eventually had over a dozen
serpentine arms that were covered with huge leaves spaced a little too
far apart (not enough light), and one year even formed little figs in
the axils which aborted, probably for lack of the required wasp. It
continued to live and grow for twenty-two years, until 1990, when what
has been called a 100-year freeze descended upon our valley. Despite its
sheltered position, it succumbed to one brief shining night that
bottomed out at 17 degrees Fahrenheit (it had survived as low as 22
degrees previously with only the smallest bit of tip burn). I can only
hope that if I live to be 100 neither I nor my pants nor the plants of
anyone I care about will be again subjected to such horribleness. That
year almost fifty percent of the mature landscape plants in this valley
suffered some sort of damage; sixty foot tall specimens of several
Australian trees were killed to the ground...even *native* plants were
damaged (our normal extreme low is more like 26 or 28 degrees, and even
that for the briefest of periods). God may have cursed women with
painful childbirth, but he cursed men and women both with frost.

P.P.S. Eek! It's 3:30 in the a.m.! I sure hope my sentences; are to
remaining gramatically correct and. My words correktly spell

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