My snake plant is blooming. I've had this plant for over ten years and it's never bloomed. Rumor is that it will have a pleasant smell. I attempted to smell the blossoms but all I could smell was the wet soil from watering it earlier in the day. I kinda hope that they don't smell like dirt. It'd be different, but a little bit of a disappointment. Another rumor that I picked up about this plant is that when pollinated, the flowers turn into orange berries. I think I'm going to do like my Grandfather did with his orange tree and pollinate it with a paint brush.
Going back about twenty years, my Grandfather decided to plant the seed of a sweet orange to see if he could even get it to grow in our WNY climate. I watched him put it into a 5 gal bucket and patiently water it regularly. He kept it in one of the warmer, more humid rooms of his house. After most of a year, he had a seedling. Summer came and the bucket lived out on the front porch.
Most of the family were a bit exasperated with Grandpa for his experiment. Grandma and I were entirely unsurprised. He was a science teacher by education and a farmer by way of the family business. He grew up out on Long Island on a potato farm. It was a big fight between him and Great-Grandpa when Grandpa wanted to go to college, but he finally talked his father into it. While at Cornell University, my paternal grandparents met and fell in love. A little while after graduation, they got married.
Before they moved up here into the boonies of WNY, Grandpa was teaching science at a school downstate. His family was growing and Grandma wanted to move closer to her parents in the Southern Tier. His farm that's on the other side of the hill from where we live and about ten minutes south west was the only house he could find close enough to drive there. (It's about a 3 hour drive from the farm down to where my Grandma's parents lived. Slightly closer than Long Island but a trickier drive because of the hilly landscape.)
He took up farming and with his sons and some employees raised a lot of corn, soybeans, and peas. Sometime in the 1970s, farming by itself wasn't quite enough to pay all the bills. Owning your own tractor is expensive, y'all. So, Grandpa got a job across the valley doing grounds keeping for the state prison. Things were such that he was able to afford to keep the farm, not work it full time, and afford to get his pilots license and a small personal airplane. That thing was his biggest hobby.
Every weekend, Grandpa and Grandma were off at fly-in breakfasts when it was the season for it. I remember the scandal among my parents' generation when Grandpa decided to put an airstrip right down the middle of the property. They were all concerned about how much land was being wasted. Grandpa answered it was his land and it was cheaper to keep the airplane on the farm than at a rented lot at the airport in the next town over. Someone tried to appeal to Grandma. She just chuckled and kept knitting. That's how my brothers and I knew that the air strip was probably her idea.
So, the story of the airstrip is one of those ones for another day, but my paternal grandparents were people who enabled each others' hobbies and catered to each others whimsies. So, when Grandpa decided he was going to try to grow an orange tree in her downstairs bathroom, Grandma's response was to water the bucket of dirt until something green came up in it. Mom insisted that the tree wasn't going to grow, being from Florida and a self-styled expert on the topic. Grandpa's answer was, "Wait and see."
After about three years of tending this slender sapling in a bucket with a handful of leaves sticking out off of it, it blossomed. Grandpa carefully pollinated it with a small paint brush and waited. The tree gradually got a tiny orange on it. My brothers weren't impressed but I thought it was the coolest thing to see an orange tree growing in my grandparents' house, with fruit on it, in the middle of January. To support the experiment, Grandpa bought a grow light and hung it up in the bathroom. After the orange tree experiment came to its conclusion, the grow light was moved to the alcove in the living room where Grandma had a veritable jungle of different plants.
So, the orange tree had an orange on it. It looked about the size of a plum. It smelled like an orange. Grandpa waited for it to get bigger but it didn't. So, after it was ripe, he picked it. He peeled it and handed my brothers and I each a piece of this orange while saving some for himself and Grandma. When Grandma got in the dining room, we tested the results of his experiment. All five of us were surprised. The seed came from a sweet orange but what we had was bitter and tasted like a cross between an orange and a lemon.
Now, I've been reading about snake plant. It'd be nice if my Grandma, whose degree included a minor in botany, was still alive. She told me that she hadn't seen a snake plant blossom here. When she gave me the plant, she said that they were from the desert and that they just show interesting leaves here. I think she'd be delighted to see the flowers. And I think Grandpa would be proud of how my indoor 'garden' is going. With the exception of the African violet, everything has been flourishing. I learned well from them how to care for houseplants. They always joked it was simple, keep the green side up and the roots down. That's what I've been doing for twenty-ish years and now something really cool is happening. I just wish they could have seen it before they passed on.
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