One of my houseplants is in a long slow spiral into death, which got me to thinking about how long I’ve been able to keep a plant alive. My oldest plant I got just after I moved to Madison, in 1993. So in a couple of months, it will be 13 years old. It started off literally as a stick with five leaves on it. Now it’s practically a bush. One central trunk/stem, with three stems branching off, each with subsidiary stems branching off of them. And on particularly festive occassions. it sort of flowers into stalks which resemble nothing so much as penises. It’s taken over a large section of one room.
I’ve got a phildendron selloum that’s 20 years old and thriving, and a couple of snake plants that old or older. Also a fern that’s 20 years old that’s doing okay, not great (I totally chop it up and repot it every couple of years) that I hang onto because it belonged to a friend who died. The Christmas cactus I inherited from the same friend is doing better than that, though I’m not seeing any flower buds on it yet this year.
I don’t have any plants, i have a black thumb. I killed an airfern even following the care directions scroupulously.
On the other hand, my mother has a jade plant that belonged to my great aunt Bessie that was in the house when they bought it from her, back in 1949, and my father says that the plant had been there as long as he could remember and he was born in 1923.
She keeps it trimmed to the size of a small shrub - roughly a meter in diameter and about 1.5 meters tall, in a huge ugly chinese pot of some sort.
I have a Christmas cactus (that thinks it’s a Thanksgiving day cactus, because that’s when it blooms :dubious: ) that belonged to a friend of mine whose father died (the father owned it, and the son was going to throw it in the trash!). I don’t know how old it is, but the friend (who is now in his 50’s) said his dad had it when he (the friend) was a kid.
I have a spider plant I bought a month after my divorce (18 years this past month). I have gained tons of babies off of it–giving away a lot of them, throwing away even more–but I did plan about four additional ones. Each of the babies are about 15 years old.
I have a mother in law’s tongue that was my paternal grandmother’s. My aunt gave me a cutting from it about 21 years ago. I don’t know how old the original plant was, since my grandmother died about 45 year ago.
My grandpa’s new wife had a Christmas Cactus that sat in the plant room on a stand her whole life. It was about a sphere 4 to 5 feet accross. It was breath taking at Christmas. She was happy to give out a cutting, but there are two plants I kill, and that is one.
I’ve managed to keep a number of house plants for 20 to 25 years. Eventually a mishap I have no control over, has doomed them. Somebody knocking them over and they die, or the ice storm killed power a bit to long.
An aunt gave us a split-leaf phildendron as a house warming present in 1959. My mother doesn’t know how to take care of plants so it did not do well. E.g., it never split a leaf. Years later I noticed it in the trash and saved it. Still have it (and several cuttings). It splits leaves now.
I have a few plants, most of indeterminate age (they had previous owners before me). I do have one, though, that’s about 6 or 7 years old. It’s some type of cactus, non-prickly, and is fairly small and always stays about the same size. It’s like a cluster of leaves, and once in awhile a new leaf comes up from the center, and an old leaf on the bottom dries up and falls off.
Bah, that’s nothing. I have one that was originally my Grandmother’s. She gave it to my mother, who passed it on to me. It’s been around since at least the 1940’s.
My mother got some sort of generic plant when my brother was born. She still has it. My brother is 45 years old this coming spring. That plant has lived in five different states: California, Washington, Maryland, Georgia and Florida.
