Ursula Carlson: Mother-in-law-tongues and more

That makes it almost five years older than my son, which is a spooky feeling, let me tell you. Given to me by my mother, it was small, a mere 4- or 5-inches tall, the easier to transport all those 2,000 miles from Michigan to here.

Today, it’s 4-feet, 3-inches tall. If I stand next to it, it comes up to my shoulder, and the tallest “tongue” grazes the skin under my chin. I used to be 5-feet 6-inches tall, but I think I’ve shrunk an inch (hopefully not more) since my heydays. I water it, along with the other plants, once a week, and each time I do, my mother seems to join me.

It’s from my mother that I learned to think of plants and trees as living beings. More like humans than humans, sometimes. She had a rubber tree that someone had given her as a gift and which soon outgrew its various pots until it reached the ceiling of our living room. Daddy suggested she trim it down, which she was reluctant to do, pointing out, “How would you feel if somebody were to cut off your head?”

In the end, of course, she had no choice when the head of the rubber tree began to bend and grow along the ceiling. In summers daddy would haul the tree outside onto the patio, but in winter, the tree came back inside. When it became too heavy to do the summer/winter thing, daddy took it down into the basement where it could, as mother termed it, “die with dignity.” No throwing it out with the trash or taking it to the dump while alive.

On the north side of our house in Michigan, mother and daddy planted a cluster of three “forest” birches, meaning they were not from a nursery but from a friend’s wooded property. Since birches are prominent in Latvia, with their “long white-stockinged legs” as mother often referred to them, they also planted a birch (from a nursery) by the driveway where, like a welcoming sentinel, it greeted everyone who drove up to visit. They also splurged on a romantic, weeping birch they planted in the side yard next to a stone so entrenched it was impossible to dig up without a tractor in an effort to soften or deflect its brazen unattractiveness.

To my mother, trees were personal. I suppose this was partly due to Latvian culture. From pagan times, when the summer equinox was celebrated with bonfires on every hill, men wore huge oak leaf crowns on their heads and young women wove garlands of linden tree flowers in their hair. Not surprisingly, the idea of maleness is encapsulated in Latvian art and literature as the oak. Femaleness as the linden tree. My mother, however, identified with the suppleness of the birch. She also adored the pine, planting our sandy, unstable hillside with pines which not only provided privacy but kept the hillside from crumbling. My dad simply admired the colorful mountain ash and the ornamental crabapple. My brother was given the Colorado spruce, and I had the weeping willow.

As if I were a wild offshoot from its mother root, I find myself following in mother’s footsteps. Plants move into bigger and bigger pots. Some start as plants and end up as trees. Currently, I have three trees in the house, one perilously close to the ceiling. I dread the day I have to trim their “heads.”

Ursula Carlson, Ph.D., is professor emerita at Western Nevada College.