I’ve been looking at my garden lately, and as I’ve only been here two years, the little 'uns are still a bit little, so to speak.
However, a few of my potted plants have a long history. The Monstera Deliciosa is a cutting from twelve years ago, back when I nearly killed the poor bugger through frost, but is now doing well and throwing babies as well.
And I took some cuttings from my mum’s house recently…an umbrella plant that had originally started in a pot in suburban Melbourne when I was a teenager in 1973, got transplanted to Yackandandah, grew into a veritable tree, and now has pride of place in MY garden 37 years later.
Oh, and lest I forget the poor old Yucca that I found, lying on the ground, roots totally devoid of soil and stuff at a ‘shared house’ my daughter lived in for a while. I took pity on the miserable thing, brought it home and put it in a pot, never expecting it to live at all.
It’s now 7’ tall, and we’ve had 8 babies that have all taken. Just show’s ya what a little bit of TLC can do for a pottie.
Hmmm. Well, I would say it is a Burning Bush, and the tag on it said that it was a ‘miniature’. I bought it for my grandpa, to plant out in his backyard. I was 18 at the time.
I planted it, with him supervising.
My family and I live in his house now, and the Burning Bush is still here, still growing, and it’s massive! Probably over 12 feet tall, and a good 24 feet around. That was 31 years ago.
Miniature, my ass!! When Fall rolls around, it turns to a vibrant red, and is absolutely beautiful. My husband wants to build a new garage, and he wants to put it exactly where the Burning Bush is located. Nope. NOT gonna happen, darlin’!
Way, way, way back in 1966 the then Governor General Sir Rodan Cutler was on a grand tour away from his eyrie at Yarralumla and visited Caldwell Public School. Don’t know why he was that far away from vice-regal society. Gawd knows why he stopped in the midst of not all that much. But to commemorate the visit he planted a tree. Out of the 22 students in the school, I got to hold the tree as he backfilled.
The school closed in the mid 80’s so it’s been untended for almost 25 years
Looked to be doing fine when I drove past a couple of weeks ago.
My ex has a rose bush in his yard which I planted about 25 years ago. I had ordered a bunch of flower bulbs from a catalog, and this bush was “only ten cents!!”. It arrived as a bare root, looked like a sad little stick. It’s huge now.
I have some bulbs in the yard here which I dug up from a friend’s old family property. Her daddy had ordered them from Holland back in the 50’s, so they are the oldest plants I have which I personally planted. Older than me, even.
My oldest plant is a Clivia that I started from seed back in the dark cold winter of '84, when we were living in a crappy rental house in South Dakota that had primitive heating and big chunks of ice formed on the inside of our windows.
Second place goes to a variegated Bougainvillea (vintage 1990) that I plant outdoors in the garden every year, and which goes back into a pot in fall for indoor growing.
I helped my father plant an elm tree in the front garden of our house on my tenth birthday (in 1974). I happened to be driving past my old house a few weeks ago and stopped to have a look. The elm is still there, flourishing.
We just moved a couple of years ago, too, so our oldest plants are the saskatoon berry and nanking cherry shrubs that we took with us; I’d say they are about six and five years old respectively. I don’t do indoor plants after the Fungus Gnat Catastrophe of 2005 (or so). I do have some lovely silk plants.
Hey, did you guys know that peonies can live to be 100 years old? I’ve got an older one at this house, and I planted a new one last year - I’ll be planting a whole bunch more here, too. They’ll probably outlast the house!
My daughter was born in May of 1984, and we planted a baby blue spruce in the front yard to commemorate and celebrate. It was the first house we’d ever owned, and when we sold it and moved on, I was sorta sad to leave the house, but almost devastated to leave the blue spruce. It had thrived and grown and matured in step with the kid–they were completely associated in my head.
Last fall, my husband drove by the old place and took a picture. The blue spruce is gigantic! We planted it too close to our little starter home, and it now darkly looms, cutting off light to the living room, and shadowing the whole front yard.
Lessons learned. My 26-year-old daugther is nothing like looming or dark or gigantic. Just the opposite.
the tulips I planted in a garden bed in 1992 were blooming when I drove past it last spring.
I’ve lived in the same house for nearly 13 years now. i brought a clump of old fashioned blue iris roots with me when we moved in and they’re still growing, as are the old fashioned lilac, hawthorn tree, apple tree and asparagus I planted the next spring.
Indoors, I have an aloe vera I grew from a cutting nearly 20 years ago.
Prunus tomentosa, planted in my parent’s yard in 1978. The yard guy cut it to the ground last fall, but that’s been done before. I’m not expecting any fruit this year, but I betcha it’ll be growing back just fine.
We have a number of Chinese Evergreens that are the offshoots of one that **Typo Knig **and his roommates owned from 1981 to 1983. Prior to that, the plant had been owned by a fraternity to which one roommate had belonged. So, let’s say 1980. That the plant survived THAT kind of neglect speaks well of the breed.
The second oldest houseplant is a ficus that I bought as an 18 inch tall potted plant back in 1989. It’s now taller than I am.
We have an outdoor plant, a clump of sedum, that is the grandchild of one formerly owned by my great aunt 20 or more years ago. My mother divided off a chunk and transplanted it to her own yard back in the 90s or so. Back in 2004, she divided off a chunk of hers and gave it to me. My brother also had a chunk of it, at his house in Illinois.
I sooooo sympathize with you on that!! I had a plant at the office (one of the Chinese evergreens) that caught gnats. When we moved offices and I took it home, it infested most of the houseplants. Even with adding BT granules to all the plants, they never completely got “gone”… I cut down on them a LOT by basically starving the plants of water (to avoid damp soil allowing breeding of the fungus and therefore interrupting the gnats’ food supply).
I lost a number of houseplants as a result of that.
