rubber plant

This rubber plant (Ficus elastica) is on Death Row. It was there all summer, but didn’t know it. The plant thought it was on a holiday, but nights are cooler now. In a month or two, there will be a clear night with frost, and the rubber plant will die.

Rubber plant left outside by shed, 2021 — Doomed rubber plant awaiting a killing frost.

The plant has a history. It is a clone (via many cuttings and air layering) of one acquired by my mother at least sixty years ago, maybe more. Every house she lived in (and my parents moved a lot) had a rubber tree in the living room. Mom liked the leaves, which could grow to two feet long while remaining relatively narrow. Maybe that’s why she put up with the plant’s growth habit in suboptimal conditions–a single stem that eventually threatened to scrape the ceiling, or acquired an ungainly lean. At that point it would be decapitated, and the cut off piece would be rooted to make a new plant. Meanwhile, the original put out a branch at right angles to the stem, which made it look like a gibbet with leaves.

Rubber plants grown in their preferred conditions look much better. (Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Pexels.com)

Eventually, Mom got rid of her rubber tree. By that time she lived in a small apartment and had also acquired a fiddle-leaf fig (Ficus lyrata), which she liked better than the rubber plant. It certainly looked better. But by then I also had a clone of the rubber plant. It wasn’t welcome in our living room, which at the time hosted two big weeping figs (Ficus benjamina), so it was relegated to what became my writing room in the basement. It’s a low-ceilinged room, and while it’s south-facing, there really isn’t enough sun for the rubber plant. So said plant ended up looking like a gibbet for gnomes. Mind you, it was present while I wrote my first novel and several others.

My mother died in October of 2018. Although I was tired of the rubber plant, which was not doing well, I felt obliged to keep it going in her memory. By this summer, the plant really was a thing of ugly. I decided that rather than watch its slow decline, I would put it outside and let the first frost kill it decisively.

Of course, with more light and lots of summer heat, the rubber plant grew new leaves, which reminded me why my mom liked the plant in the first place. But its proportions haven’t improved; if anything, the extra foliage has made it even more of a hulking mess. It wouldn’t be easy to find a spot for it in its old quarters, and it would likely go into a decline again over the winter. So it’s now on Death Row.

As a gardener, I feel a certain amount of guilt about this. If the rubber plant were a cat or dog that just happened to look old and scruffy, I wouldn’t be planning its demise, would I? On the other hand, gardeners rip out and kill healthy weeds without compunction. Maybe it’s because this is a house plant, and of course there’s that connection with my mother.

I thought about propagating a new plant. Unlike animals, plants are sort of immortal in that new clones can be created through cuttings or tissue cultures. The best way to make a new rubber plant is a technique called air layering. You cut partway through a branch and wrap the cut area with sphagnum moss, making sure to keep the cut open. Wrap plastic around the moss and stem and keep the moss damp. Roots grow in several weeks, at which point the new plant may be removed and potted up. My current plant was produced this way, and its predecessor dispatched. I blogged about that HER E.

The trouble is that under the same suboptimal growing conditions that produced ugly specimens before, a new rubber plant would be no different. Watching my various rubber plants looking less than beautiful was not a happy experience, so I’ve decided it’s time to bid Ficus elastica a fond farewell.

A couple of days ago, I did in a plant, a sprawling, hideous monstrosity of a rubber “tree” that had lived in a low-ceilinged, south facing basement room for years. It was deformed by the unsuitable situation I had inflicted upon it, but even so… It was impossible to get to the window to water the other potted plants that sat on the sill without crouching to get under the rubber tree’s branches. Most of the leaves were on the ends of the branches, making the thing look like a somewhat arthritic tentacled monster. There was no way to improve it, so when I managed to air-layer a cutting last summer, I decided to dispose of it.

I find it hard to kill plants that I have watered and otherwise cared for. In a way it’s like euthanizing a pet animal, except that in the case of the plant, one usually does the job oneself, and it’s doubtful whether one is really putting it out of any misery. Lugging the rubber tree outside, lopping off its branches, finally yanking the trunk out of its pot and hacking up the root ball, I felt like a brutal executioner. Plants don’t scream, but rubber plants bleed latex. Now that the deed is done, however, I certainly appreciate the spaciousness of the room where it used to live, and the unimpeded access to the window.

The rubber plant was an ugly, misshapen specimen, so you can imagine how much trouble I have killing a healthy, attractive plant of almost any sort. Only the worst weeds fail to generate a twinge of compunction. This brings me back to those wretched maple trees that dominate my garden. In theory they could be removed quite readily. There are several tree-removal outfits in town. Indeed, one of them cut down yet another maple here some years ago, one that grew in the 12 foot wide space between my house and my neighbour’s. It was so obviously in the wrong place that I didn’t experience many qualms about its demise, and since then I’ve planted a perennial border in that space.

But the two maples on the west side of my back garden present other “issues.” One of them supports a hearty climbing rose of unknown variety (at least to me), that has hundreds of small, fragrant, fully double pinky-white blooms every June and July. I suspect that it would tolerate being cut down and repositioned, but the prospect of doing this doesn’t appeal to me. Neither does the general disruption and chaos brought by men and machines to the plantings (such a grand word for my collection of tough survivors!) near the trees. Finally, those trees are homes to other creatures — a gang of squirrels and the local crow family, as well as other birds I hear singing on summer mornings. So I dither and defer, all the while muttering and complaining mightily about roots and shade.