A Miraculous Plant?

This is a little for Christmas,  but some years ago, I was living with a girlfriend in New Jersey on River Road, facing across the river toward New York’s West Side. It was Christmas Eve, a clear night but also one of the coldest nights in a very long time.  Also, the heating system of the apartment was not performing very well. Early in the night the hissing and chortling of the pipes would die down. 

On this hyper-wintry night, the cold and the wind were closing in on us, and I thought to myself how lucky I was to have beautiful Francesca, my flute-playing lover, to stay warm with under the covers of our bed.  Wonderful, I thought, to have this living sanctuary of warmth with me at arms-length. We listened to music, had already exchanged gifts, and had dinner.

We were starting to feel the cold more, so instead of adding sweaters, why not retire to the bedroom where cuddly warmth awaited us?  My suggestion met with approval and an inviting smile. 

But then something happened—I forgot to mention: Francesca, just short of being a perfect gal, had a fiery temper. So, there we were, on the threshold of yuletide bliss, but then I said something wrong. I wish I could remember what I said. Whatever it was, it triggered my lady’s temper. The result was that I found myself backing out of the bedroom, followed by the door being slammed shut.

What was I to do? I resigned myself to sleeping on the floor. I did have to break back into my bedroom to collect what I needed to avoid freezing to death.  Suddenly, it was a lonely Christmas Eve.  Francesca made herself invisible and motionless under covers and pillows. I grabbed one more sweater and split from the bedroom. It took a moment to arrange a space on the floor to sleep, a place where I could manage my night at the North Pole. Eventually, I fell asleep.

Morning came, I woke up, and the sun was out.  But something quickly grabbed my attention. I became aware that the room, the air, was suddenly fragrant. What on earth! Suddenly, the bedroom door opened and Francesca, not fully dressed, is gazing at me. “That smell,” she said, and looked around.  I looked around too, and we both noticed something about the plant on the windowsill.  It had bloomed overnight with large white flowers!  It was the flowers that were giving off the fragrance.

 

Francesca and I said nothing but breathed in the magnificent fragrance; we looked at each other and embraced.  We didn’t say a word about our quarrel the night before. It was Christmas morning and we both felt as if the flowering in what turned out to be the coldest night of the year was a message to us about keeping a warm heart in a cold world.

For some time after, I stopped by various florists, and nobody ever heard of a plant like mine ever flowering in bitter cold.  Finally, I went to the Bronx Botanical Gardens with a photograph of the flowered plant and my story.  I remember the botanist there smiling with amazement and saying, “The plant is called dracaena fragrans. Flowering in such bitter cold was a miracle.”

Fran and I eventually went our own ways. But we can tell a story of how a mysterious plant brought us beautifully together once upon a cold time.  It was, after all, Christmas, a time about miracles.  When we woke up to the fragrance of those miraculous flowers, the anger and pique between us completely vanished. The spirit of Christmas lay behind this miracle, I thought.  Plants are living and have a certain consciousness; so perhaps the plant was stressed out by our quarreling and flowered to change the atmosphere with a new fragrance.   I’m just dreaming out loud, but if you’re curious  about the latest science of plant consciousness, you might try Dr. Monica Gagliano in Thus Spoke the Plant, an account of the author’s personal encounters with individual plants and her theories of plant consciousness.