Topeka Capital Journal
Aug. 8, 1999

You’ve been worrying, I’m sure, about our ficus trees, wondering how they have fared this summer in the intense heat, and how the future looks for them. The answer to both questions is, better than yours truly. They look healthier now than they did a year ago, and their future holds unlimited promise. I wish the same could be said of me.

The trees have spent the summer on the deck, under the sheltering arms of the umbrella-shaped redbud tree and have flourished like they had found the Garden of Eden. They took to the scorching heat and high humidity like kudzu takes to southern soil, all the while enjoying the shade and regular watering by a loving hand.

The result is new growth and shape that should rank them among the better ficuses in the free world. They can say to themselves that it doesn’t get much better than this.

But I say to myself, what wouldn’t do well with this kind of care and attention? Put me in a similar setting, and tend to me daily, and I, too, probably could grow taller and handsomer. Give me the opportunities those trees get, and I might improve my posture and learn to look good standing in a corner.

My personal relationship with the trees has not improved. We have had them longer than we have had any of our grandchildren, and we have done much more for the two pulp-producing potted pretenders than we have for the nine young humans. And what have the trees done for me? Given me a double hernia, that’s what.

There is nothing I have done for the grandchildren that I haven’t done double for the ficuses. I have loaded the trees and hauled them across country. I have carried them from our vehicles into motel rooms so they wouldn’t get too cold, or too lonesome, during the night. I have nurtured them. I have clothed them, wrapping them in blankets to move them in the dead of winter.

I have even trained the trees in a way, repotting them when they grew too big for what you could call the training pots. I have pleaded with them not to die while my wife was out of town, because she would accuse me of killing her beloved woody perennials.

No wonder my grandchildren dislike and distrust me. They somehow know I not only have spent more time with the two trees than I have with them, but I also have done more for them.

How many times have I carried a grandchild outdoors in my arms and found a nice shady spot for him or her to enjoy the splendors of summer? Never. How many times have I trimmed the tresses of the children? Never, but I’ve often trimmed the trees, under the close supervision, of course, of our in-house chief nursery person.

We brought home the first ficus, the one with the trunks twisted like braided hair or old Granger Twist chewing tobacco, when we lived in Wichita. That was 20 or more years ago, and we added the second in Des Moines. We moved both to Boulder, Colo., one summer, and they survived only because my wife conned the moving van driver into watering them along the way.

When we moved from Boulder to Topeka it was December, with freezing weather, so we loaded the trees into two cars. We got a late start from Boulder and stopped overnight, meaning we had to take the trees into our motel room. It was that night, and next morning, when I told Joyce Kilmer, wherever he was, that he was full of it.

That was 14 years ago, and our oldest grandchildren are just now reaching that age. How can I ever make them believe I like them better than I like the trees, and would gladly do more for them than for any ficus? I would give them the trees to prove it, if I could.

The younger tree suffered pretty severe limb and leaf trauma in the cold move from Colorado, despite our precautions. However, our in-house chief nursery person gave it a drastic pruning and it recovered fully.

Then, just last year, the older tree developed a serious case of dry limbs and falling leaves. When all else failed, the nursery person gave it a pruning like I’d never seen, so harsh the tree looked like a tornado victim. I would look longingly at it and wonder if the other tree could suffer a similar fate. But it came back, making a remarkable recovery.

From the beginning, it has been the custom in the summer to set the trees outside on a patio, deck or balcony, depending on where we were living, to give them the benefits of the cleansing rain, the healing heat and humidity, and then bring them in for the winter. I am in charge of the moves — closely supervised, of course.

Kilmer wrote about “a poem lovely as a tree,” but Kilmer never had to carry six-foot ficus trees, in big clay pots full of dirt, up and down stairs. There was a time when I could pick up one by the trunk and carry it with one hand. Now, they’re bigger, and so are the pots, and I’m older, and I need help on moving day.

It’s coming up. The older one, sickly for a year, now is so robust it has cracked its old pot and awaits a new one. Then they will go back inside, and there’s a question over which one deserves the prime spot, in front of the windows downstairs.

But there’s no question about this: Kilmer wrote about “a tree that looks at God all day and lifts its leafy arms to pray.” Our trees do that, and they survive only because God answers their prayers, and not mine.