My plants - blue potato bushes

It sucks living in my backyard.

I admit I don't take good care of my plants. It is alot of work to trim and dump yard waste. When my best buddy Victor stayed at my house for the weekend in 2000, all he could say was "the plants are mostly dead". In reality that was really a (lame) strategy, I let nature take its course. After a few years of neglect, the weak would have perished. What surived, probably didn't require much of attention. That included my two blue potato bushes.

My two blue potato bushes were planted two months after we've moved into our brand new house. At first there were other plants in that spot. But the neighbor reported a water leak from the base of the wooden fense and had contractors come in to tear down the whole thing, broke the sprinkler pipes and made a mess to rebuild it. We lost our privacy for weeks but after the fense were put back up, the super came in and planted these two bushes there as a good gesture (well, we asked him to).

Most blue potato bushes are kept as short trees. The super put ours in front of a trellis hoping it would climb. They didn't, they have minds of their own. Within a year they sprouted from two little shrubs into some monstrous growth, stretching left, right and upwards to two shadow casting giants. We bought gardening tapes to try to tie the branches together, of course that didn't work out.

It's time to trim it down, my mother had decided, so we went and got ourselves a 32" lopper from Home Hepot, the kind buglarers use to cut pad locks, you know. At first I thought she was just going to prune off the edges. She didn't, she carved them back down to the size when they were first planted - most of the leaves were gone at the end. When I got home from work and saw the carnage, I would have cried mama if it wasn't my mama who did it.

I thought they were just going to wither away, but surprisingly the trimming worked. The leaves grew back bigger and more dense. Summer came and they burgeoned with hundreds of little purple blossoms. So abundant I clipped off some banches and stuck them in a vase for in-door decoration. It's not that kind of plant however; the buds would normally fall off within a day after.

Every year from spring to late fall these two bushes would don themselves with these beautiful little flowers. The spring of 2006 was unseasonally rainy in the bay area. Add the California sun and you've got the almost perfect weather for vegetations. That April the hills at Fremont were as green as they have never been. With my dad bored out of his mind doing nothing much except watching Mexican futball on TV and pampering the plants in the backyard, my two bushes flourished.

The end of the same year saw a harsh winter. Starting the beginning of 2007 leaves fell off in mass, not just in my yard, that happened to many trees in the streets too. My dad tried to rescue my bushes by trimming them down more than usual; that didn't work. By the time my dad left my house in February they were just bare branches with no leaves at all. He thought we had killed them. I assured him I knew my plants, they are tough and they pull through anything. That was the last time my dad stayed at my house, he never returned to see my two bushes again.


No doubt they survived that winter. In fact by spring, their once bare branches were again covered lushly with green and purple dots, attracting many bees and other buzzing pollenators alike. Today, my two blue potato bushes thrive. When I water them while their branches wave in the wind I would think about how they have really been like family members living in the same house with me for all these years, all the good memories of me spending time doing yard work with my parents, and how after staying in this house for more than 9 years, I am finally starting to think of this place as my home.