Alive!

I'm still trying to assess the damage of the three and a half weeks of negligence I inflicted on my beloved houseplants while I was home over the holidays.

There has been carnage. Of course the little Easter Lily in the bathroom died along with one of my pink and green herbaceous plants and the cuttings I was trying to root. The orchid seems to have given up, several of the Alocasias are on their last legs. And perhaps the most tragic has been the passing of my beloved cardboard sago palm and Nikau palm. RIP.

The Ficus benjamina was of course visibly upset and threw down almost all his leaves, but has gotten out his aggression and has put out a respectable number of new leaves. I saved the Wandering Jews by making cuttings, which are growing happily in their water baths.

I've been holding out on the Ficus lyrata, though, the Fiddleleaf fig. His enormous violin shaped leaves were too heavy for his flaccid petioles, and he dropped them all one after another until he had just a few stems jutting up from his pot. Normally, I'd have taken a plant like that for dead, but being a ficus I thought just maybe he had a little something up his sleeve. Or, down in his root. So, I kept watering his empty pot and lo and behold two itty bitty baby leaves have been unveiled from his growing tips! He is alive!