A Piece of My Heart

 This is a post for Phoebe and Oscar and Liam, so we can remember together. Yes, it's about a plant, but it's also about a trip that glows like a firefly in the back of our minds, a trip we took in December 2019, as a way to celebrate Christmas together, for the first time without their daddy in our lives. 

 I love a plant with a story, almost as much as I love a mystery. Exactly a year ago, I found a pot spilling over with a strange, fleshy-leaved vine. It had tubular red flowers. I had absolutely no idea what it was.

This mystery plant was found in the tiny pueblo of Agulo, on La Gomera, Canarias. Here is Agulo, with the island of Tenerife, with its volcano, in the background. We've been there, Phoebe, Liam and I! Look at those serpentine roads! That rugged landscape, and the way Agulo just huddles at the base of the cliffs, shaded by them for so much of the day.

You have no idea what beautiful memories are elicited by seeing this photo.

I'm going to take you back to La Gomera in the Canary Islands, and our trip just a year ago, before the world fell apart.  Going to take you in the way back machine just 12 months, when we could still fly in jets across the sea. Phoebe rented a little smartcar and away we (Liam, Phoebe and I) went on a whirlwind tour of her favorite places on the island, a rugged chunk of basalt ringed by the blue Atlantic Ocean. 

We ate lunch at Mirador Agulo, a glass-walled restaurant that looks out on the sea and down on Agulo. There, I got some photos of my kids leaping in the air over Tenerife's volcano that are among my favorite of all time. 

The photos were funny until I suggested the kids give me a deadpan look as they soared above the red earth. Then they turned magical.

After lunch and photo leaping, we made a walking tour of little Agulo, my favorite village on the island, hands down.  It had the walls of antiquity, and seemed to be a haven for plant mavens! Look at the potted anthuriums lining this alleyway!

The doors alone left me reeling, they were so beautiful. This knocker was a hand...and in the background, you can see my kids  talking in the cobblestone street. I couldn't tear myself away from the doors.

And this one...oh my gosh, the shades of weathered sea green. OK, so its functionality isn't terribly high, but it is a piece of art. 

We found a magical garden of magnificent specimens of succulents and cacti--how about those red and yellow fishhook cacti?? These New World cacti are far away from their native lands, to be sure, as is the African crown of thorns. What a treat for this Ohioan to see, though, and to imagine being able to grow cacti and succulents outdoors in the ground! It certainly tells you how little rain La Gomera gets. In Ohio, they'd rot, drown, freeze and die. It'd just be a matter of in which order. 

Next to this garden was another magical doorway. 

I think red and blue is my favorite color combination (see my house...)

And I wondered: Do people consciously create these effects? Noooo...Does the weather do it? Yep. But I wonder: Do they think, "Man, my gate is weathered so beautifully!" Or do they think, "I should really repaint that..." I just wonder. To me, it's the most beautiful thing imaginable, what weather does to these layers of paint on ancient wood.  The rot and the wear and the weathering. Wabi sabi. It helps to have such a dry climate, to preserve the wood without degrading it.

And next to that gate in the tiny village of Agulo was a low round terra cotta pot. And growing in that pot was a plant, and I had absolutely no idea whatsoever what it was. I couldn't even get it to family. Maybe Gesneriaceae? The leaves were fleshy and rounded and dense; the flowers bewitching bells of coral red. Oh my. The only thing I knew was that it looked to me like something that might take to propagation. 

Yesssss my preciousssssss.

We finished our evening walk around Agulo, me trailing behind my long-legged, lithe kids, muttering and exclaiming over every little beautiful thing. Which included those kids. I watched Phoebe walk by an outdoor restaurant, and saw every head turn to watch her pass. There aren't many tall redheads on this chunk of basalt in the blue Atlantic sea. And yet she owned her foreignness; gave it up; acknowledged that when she got there she couldn't understand a word people said, yet became perfectly fluent, complete with a Gomeran accent (aspirated word endings, among other things); and loved the place as fully as anyone could. She made it her home. She moved boldly and confidently all over that island, drinking from its springs and picking its figs, making friends and getting the lay of the land as only she can. That is a talent, that is a gift, and I am so proud of her for her malleability and her willingness to give something so potentially scary a go. I couldn't have done that like she did, not in a million years. 

For that matter, there aren't many tall blonde lads, either. Just as there aren't hedges of bougainvillea and Ficus benjamina at bus stops in Ohio.

I still can't believe we got to do all this, only a year ago. It makes me savor the thought of past and future travel, with the razor sharp edge of keen longing.

Just to sit by the sea and watch the sun sink over the waves, on the island my daughter called home before the world fell apart and she was sent back to the States.

photo by Oscar Bello Goya

Fast forward a year, and I am home, watching a very small plant that languished and did nothing at all for nine months on a west windowsill in the house, then in a sunny hanging basket on the front porch. It grew a little, but it never bloomed. Just before frost hit, I tugged it out of its hanging basket and potted it up. And then I moved it to the greenhouse, with the idea that perhaps it would prefer that to another winter of  cold nights against the west window. So often, temperature is what throws a plant, keeps it from becoming what it is meant to be. And in the humid heat of the greenhouse, it started to grow and vine a little, and then it threw out some buds. I was beside myself.

The buds became peach-coral bell-shaped flowers. And I still had absolutely no idea what this plant even was. 

I put it out to my Facebook friends, thinking it might be a gesneriad of some kind. And my friend Vicki rooted around and asked some people and came up with an ID for me: Kalanchoe manginii, Beach Bells or Chandelier Plant. It is native to Madagascar! Oh! Oh! Oh! It's in the Crassulaceae, along with succulents like jade plants and, of course, kalanchoe!

 No wonder it did the best when grown in the same conditions as my sweet yellow grocery-store kalanchoe! Here they are side by side. Gotta love it! As you can see, manginii is a viner, its peach bells borne on wiry stems like lights on a chandelier. Once Vicki told me it was a kalanchoe, the paired leathery opposite leaves and the happy, handy little air roots it makes made perfect sense. I just couldn't see their relatedness by the flowers.

Two kalanchoes. Ain't that a kick in the pants? 

I can't tell you how I love it, and how excited I am to see it when it's in full bloom. It's going to be a while--weeks!  This plant does everything verrry sloooowly. 

That's OK. I've got time. 

I've already rooted a cutting and potted it up for Phoebe to take home with her to North Carolina, so she can watch and wait for it to bloom. Seemed only right. Ah special plants, and sharing them with those I love, and the memories tied up in them--they are  all pieces of my heart. 

What is THAT??

I've been collecting photos of weird stuff I find on my runs and thought I'd share them here. Sometimes it's the mysteries that pull me down the road each morning. 

I suspect the people who drive the roads I run are accustomed to seeing me crouching on the road, studying and photographing something or other at my feet. If only they knew that I am often studying a mess of stomach contents... I wonder if they think I'm simple. I'm anything but simple. I'm curious. And don't give a frog pellet about what they think of me as they whizz by in their cars and pickups.

I have absolutely no idea what happened here on our county road one July night. Did a skunk throw up? It's an assemblage of bugparts, including roaches, tiny green hornets, and unidentified beetles (maybe big green June beetles? The other thing that occurred to me was that perhaps this was the stomach contents of a frog or toad, the rest of which got eaten by an owl. Or perhaps it's an ill-formed screech owl pellet. I just do not know. And it will drive me crazy for awhile. Maybe forever.

Hayrolls are an amazing feature of midsummer in Ohio. They're these huge architectural structures that suddenly appear in new-mown fields. And the animals take note. They love to sit on them, hunt from and around them.

Phoebe found a bolus atop a hayroll and brought it to me for identification. I studied it for a long, long time. There were green beetle wing cover bits, and many seeds, perhaps of blackberries or dewberries. So whatever made this bolus eats fruit and insects. And whatever made it is pretty darn big. See quarter for size comparison. The bolus is 1.5" long.

Because I had the advantage of using all my senses to explore this item, and you have only sight, I will tell you that it was fresh, hard-packed, still slightly moist, shiny on the outside and absolutely odorless. So that rules out poop.

I don't want to give away the myskery. I thought about it for about 45 minutes while I straightened the studio. And suddenly it hit me what it had to be. It was a Eureka! moment. I will reveal in the next post, after you've had time to guess. There's also the fascinating possibility that it's not what I think it is, and that one of you has the answer. So guess away!

There have been many other such boluses, most of them much smaller, but made up of much the same thing: insect parts and seeds. All deposited atop hayrolls. So think about it...

I'm guessing that this disorganized regurgitant came from a screech owl or red-shouldered hawk. Small mammalian vertebrae and fur...again, odorless. Not poop.

Sometimes I generate my own mysteries. I was so struck by these structures in some garden plants I was pulling out that I freed them of leaves and roots and laid them out on the sidewalk.

I put it out on Facebook and only one person guessed correctly what they were. Vickie's a great gardener. 

Clue: I told Chet not to chew them. He was thinking about it, too. 

On the porch of a recently abandoned cabin I found this:

Any child of the 70's will know this. It's a dead lava lamp. My friends and I decided that this is where wax lips go after you chew them up. Sad to see the majestic heady mystery of the lava lamp reduced to alcohol  (missing here, thanks to the cracked glass housing) and wax lips. 

What do you give a curious Science Chimp for her birfday? Ask Bill.

How about an anatomically correct broken heart (note Band-aids), and pendants cast from  real hummingbird and bat skulls? Yeah, I squealed too. 

 

Phoebe found them on Etsy and all hell broke loose. We love them. Corey gave her an anatomically correct heart for her birthday. Only no Band-aids. If you love them too, check out Blue Bayer Design.  Tell Billy Blue I sent you.

 This post was inspired by a moment this afternoon when I was munching on a Mojo Bar. Laid the rest of it on my sidetable, and jumped when I realized that, if I weren't paying attention, I might just ingest one of my many Mystery Boluses. Classic Zick moment.

One tastes like chocolate and coconut, and one likely doesn't.