Wednesday

The Friendship Plant


I have a fun tradition going with my friends, thought I would tell you about it.  Similar in propagation to a chain letter or Amish friendship bread, we have a friendship spider plant.  I first was gifted a branch of this spider plant some fifteen years ago in college.

Spider plants are funny creatures.  As you can see above, they have spiky outgrowth on the top like Bart Simpson hair or something.   I think this gives them a punk rock undertone.  If my spider plants wore tee shirts, they would surely be black tee shirts with a tuxedo undershirt printed on them.

They are ideal pets for single people.  I travel some 180 flights a year and still have not managed to kill one of these things, despite weeks at a time of neglect, no attention to pot size, temperature, sunlight and frankly very limited attention to water.

When a spider plant is well watered, they spawn little offshoots like the one on the left in the picture above.  Those offshoots can be sat in a bucket of water till they grow roots, then planted on their own, and they make a net new spider plant!  I give them to my friends, then over time they give them to their friends.  We are probably on generation seven or eight in some cases since I started giving them away to friends.

There are few things in life I enjoy more than going to a dinner party at a friends house and seeing a distant descendant of my spider plant in their house.  Regrettably I am not as diligent and process oriented about the distribution of my spider plants as I would like to be.  Some of my best and most long time friends have still somehow escaped being the recipient of one of my spider plant gifts.

If you are one of the three people on this planet who actually reads my blog, it's 100% fair game to feel like you should have one of these plants and drop me a note to mention it.  I have a couple that need planted right now and gifted...  They are reasonably ugly little plants, but quirky and charming in their own way
(kinda like most of my favorite people...)