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11.05.01
My boss has an African violet named Hepburn. She was sitting in his office window looking droopier by the day, so I borrowed her with the plan of rejuvenating her in my sunny kitchen at home, where my own African violets have flourished.
I managed to decapitate Hepburn within 2 minutes of removing her from his office and bringing her back to my own desk. Not only was she "droopy," but she had crown rot, and her entire set of leaves just lifted right off the stem when I peeked underneath a leaf to analyze her condition. Her condition was dead, is what her condition was.
I was slow to admit to my boss that Hepburn was gone, but I couldn't pull the old replace-her-with-an-identical-plant stunt, because I'd never seen her in bloom. African violets can bloom purple, violet, pink, or white. What color were Hepburn's blooms? No idea whatsoever.
I found another pathetic-looking yet unrotted violet on an "end-of-season-plant-reject" sale cart at Home Depot and brought her back to work, complete with instructions for care and a little bag of African violet fertilizer. This was a few weeks ago, and I've secretly checked in on her a couple times since. The New Hepburn is also doomed, I fear. For one thing, she's on a windowsill between a blowing air vent and a plate glass window, and I think her ambient temperature ranges wildly around the optimum 70 degrees Fahrenheit that African violets like. For another, I'm not sure my boss is that into her. I've wondered if the first Hepburn was a gift he'd have just as soon lived without. But the biggest problem is her namesake.
I'd assumed "Oh, Katherine Hepburn, The African Queen, cute," but he'd actually named her after Katherine Hepburn's character Violet Venable in "Suddenly Last Summer." If you've never seen it, it's a creepy little Tennesse Williams play that was turned into a creepy little movie in 1959. It starred Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clift. Here's a blurb off Netflix describing it:
In New Orleans in 1937, a rich widow, Mrs. Venable, plans to fund a hospital building for a state asylum, if Dr. Cukrowicz will perform a lobotomy on her niece Catherine. Mrs. Venable is distraught over the death of her son Sebastian last summer in Europe. Sebastian and his mother used to travel abroad together every summer, except the previous summer, when he took his cousin Catherine instead. Catherine appeared to go mad the day that Sebastian died under mysterious circumstances.
It's very disturbing. Even the plants in Violet's conservatory are carnivorous. So I'm not sure that naming Hepburn after Hepburn in reference to this particular movie really bode well for the plant. So when I check up on her, I hum "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" If she thinks she's named after Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady," she's sure to make a remarkable transformation.
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