The cactus and the money plant.

The cactus and the money plant.


Cacti, like tortoises live to a ripe old age. Like tortoises, they lead unhurrried, peaceful (one might almost say still) lives. In general, they trouble no-one and no-one troubles them; they've seen to that! They maintain unruffled, deadpan lives although they must bear silent witness to all manner of upheavals; when their owners move, for example or when someone they share their home with falls down the stairs at their feet, becoming as still as the cacti themselves.
The strange affair between a cactus and a succulent growing in the same terracotta pot began on my window-ledge about a decade ago. It was I who bore testimony to the affair, to the twists and turns of this menage a deux. As I was an unattached woman, the affair had to stand in place of a human one.
The relationship between the cactus and the succulent took place in several majestic acts which unfolded first in my kitchen then, when the two plants had gained height and I had seen fit to move them, in the bathroom on the window-ledge overlooking my white, enamel bath.
At first, the cactus was a modest four inches tall. Its spines were arranged along its eight double-seamed ridges in pairs, sprouting from nodes spaced at regular intervals down those stitched seams like the legs of a caterpillar. Its near neighbour was a money plant with pinky- green, fleshy leaves. Over the course of time, the money plant began to gain height, reaching that of the cactus. There was nothing remarkable, you would have thought, in the coexistence of plants in the same pot. However, you would have been underestimating the ingenuity of these two creatures, of their shared lives, as I did.
Once, in the bath, I had glanced up at the terracotta pot, noticed the proximity of the two plants and found myself wondering how they planned to share the environment, for it seemed that they had started to lean towards each other. I dismissed the question to begin with, invoking one of my Mum's sayings that 'water always finds its own level.' The fluidity of this assertion ensures that one can apply it to almost any situation with pleasing conclusions.
After a few months the spines of the cactus had grown perilously close to the fleshy leaves of the money plant. Was this a case of 'opposites attract' or just waywardness, happenstance?
I waited for the two plants to pool their ideas about how they would maintain their distance or else become conjoined, or perish.
There can be no room for strife whether you are sharing an island, a street, a house or a pot, yet the bristling animosity that can arise over territorial claims, is never far away.
In fact I was to witness both accord and animosity, diplomacy and deception over the ensuing months, the years. The poor succulent, who had the misfortune to be a kind of cellmate to the cactus, and in order to protect herself from the assaults of his spines had to pretend that everything was alright, that she was not hurt by his piques, his slow stabbings, his putting the knife in and twisting it. She could not, would not allow him the satisfaction of his torments, the final satisfaction of murder, or whatever it was to be.
Thus, whenever a spine from the seam of the cactus managed to penetrate the fleshy cuticle of the money plant's leaves, whenever a fencing move was made, she would faint so slowly that the injury would go unnoticed by the marauding cactus. Punctured by his apparent failure to make an impression , the cactus would then make a temporary withdrawal. After a few weeks, a new approach would begin to unfold.
Thus began an almost imperceptible dance; a dance of retreats and rapprochements that was to continue for many years.
I went away one September for a week and was shocked when, upon my return, I discovered that there had been a particularly spiteful, spineful attack on the money plant, whose plate-like leaves were now dull, wrinkling, dessicated. The whole of its being was atrophied. The plant was slowly dying. There was nothing for it but to remove it from the shared pot and hope that it would make a recovery.
I rehomed the money plant in one of the larger pots I had been collecting in my back yard (with the idea of introducing other succulents or cacti to my flat to join the five-foot tall Weeping Fig, Dracaena and the Mother-in law's Tongue all housed in the bedroom). I had been considering buying a group of Living Stones from the local nursery.
I placed the money plant on a window-sill in the kitchen where it would benefit from the morning sun that often poured through the sash window. The remaindered cactus was left standing on the bathroom window-sill, behind frosted glass. It looked stark, odd, growing as it was rather at the margin of the pot the two plants had shared for so long, without a fall guy. I was obliged to stand the cactus in its pot close to the wall, fearing it might topple over.
Almost as soon as I had moved the shrivelled succulent to sunnier climes, it began to flesh out, to regain its full stature and its pinky-green hue.
One evening, shortly after the transplant, I was preparing a meal for my two sisters and I. The radio was meting out its 5p.m. news coverage. The news items on the kitchen radio were being delivered in well-modulated, suave tones with breathing-space intermissions to separate them. A Parliamentary recess had ended and a trial at the Crown Court had dismissed the case of a mother accused of smothering her baby to death on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
A tiny crashing noise, barely audible, was attached to this news item. It hadn't come from the radio or even from the kitchen but from somewhere else in the flat, The hall perhaps, or the downstairs landing. I descended the half-flight of stairs to the bathroom and was startled by the contrast between the smooth whiteness of the bath and the matt, shock of ink-black soil, broken terracotta and,worst of all, the prone cactus, a dark green exclamation mark, finally unable to stand alone, a fish out of water.