Kathleen showed up to my office at the church in North Carolina sometime in 2005, holding a small houseplant. “I want you to have this,” she told me. “It’s getting too big for my apartment.” It was hard to see how the small spiny shrub she had brought could be too big for anything; it was only six or eight inches tall, in a compact terra cotta flowerpot. But Kathleen lived in a senior living facility nearby, and though she had one of the larger units, it still wasn’t a lot of space. I thanked her for it, took it from her, and added it to my small collection of office plants.
The plant was a crown of thorns, Euphorbia milii, which is native to Madagascar. It looks like it would be a part of the cactus family, but it’s not—it’s a succulent. The crown of thorns has the appearance of something that evolved in a tough neighborhood; it’s covered in the spines that give it its name, and from looking at it, most reasonable creatures wouldn’t try to eat it. Just in case the spines weren’t enough to ward off grazers, though, the plant is also poisonous. The sap of it will make people very sick, but it will kill most animals. Clearly, this is a plant that needed to assert itself in the midst of a lot of threats.
Kathleen was already one of the oldest people I knew when she gave me the plant—she was in her early 90s. She was genteel, well-composed, and proper, but she was kind about it. Noticing that I didn’t wear them, Kathleen once offered to buy me some neckties. I declined the offer, which I could tell disappointed her. We became friends, Kathleen and I. She made a point of becoming friends with people much younger than her, and I was seven decades younger. She stopped by my office to chat, and a few times she invited Jessa and I out to lunch. She always paid. We talked about her childhood in St. Augustine Florida, which had been difficult, and about the Methodist church she had grown up in there. She told me about how she and her husband Madison had started dating during the Great Depression, when they were in high school. She married Madison in that Methodist church in St. Augustine, a beautiful building near the water. Madison was long dead, but she talked about him constantly, with a reverence that could be startling. Theirs seemed to have been a great love, and a long one. If she had lived to a usual age, she wouldn’t have had too many years without him. But her body kept on spinning like a top, refusing to slow down.
I moved away when Kathleen was 95 or 96. The crown of thorns spent 5 days in the back of a moving truck, rumbling along I-40, I-24, I-57, and finally almost 600 miles of I-70. The plant made the trip unscathed. We unloaded it at our new house in Denver, and I took it to my new job at a new church. It lived there in my offices, first a south-facing one with very little window and then a west-facing one, doing just fine with its once-a-week watering regimen and occasional fertilizer. On a visit back to North Carolina I told Kathleen that her crown of thorns was flourishing, and she seemed pleased. She told me how her son lived in a Denver suburb and she was going to be driving out to see him soon, 1500 miles each way in her grand Cadillac. I heard later that she did make the drive, and back, but we never caught up in Denver. She loved to drive, and she loved that Cadillac. According to her obituary, Kathleen renewed her driver’s license the year she turned 100.
Several years after we moved away, I got word that Kathleen’s health was declining, and then that she had died, at 101 years old. I thought about reaching out to her son in the Denver area, to convey my condolences and perhaps to offer him the plant as a keepsake, but I didn’t know how to get in touch with him. And anyway, I cherished Kathleen’s crown of thorns. I started a new job with a new office in a grand old sandstone building, and I moved the plant to a second-floor space with north-facing windows and then to a third-floor space with two windows to the north and one to the west. For about a year during the pandemic, when it became clear that I wouldn’t be going to the office very much, I brought all my office plants home. The kids wouldn’t go near the crown of thorns where it sat in the living room; its ancient tough-neighborhood defenses triggered something evolutionary in their brains, and they instinctually knew to stay away. They were relieved when I loaded all my office plants into the car to move them back, relaxing again in front of the television like an immobile but ever-present threat had moved on. Now the crown of thorns is back in my office, sitting by the westward window with its glorious afternoon light, looking out on the Rocky Mountains.
The crown of thorns is still in the same terra cotta pot that Kathleen gave it to me in. That’s an almost criminal level of neglect for a plant—to not repot it in seventeen years of ownership. I have thought about it many times, and one day I will do it, but I am wary of disturbing it when it seems to be happy where it is. It flowers almost year round, putting out little bunches of pinkish-red blossoms, and it grows taller and taller with each passing year. These days it’s a little over 3 feet tall, which is giant for an indoor specimen of this species. I have watered it about 900 times over the years, assuming my usual once-a-week schedule, and as far as I can tell it has never felt over-watered or under-watered. A few years ago a stray jade leaf fell into the soil by the crown of thorn’s roots and took hold; now a volunteer jade plant has joined the crown of thorns in the pot, and it’s getting crowded in there. The jade is about the size that the crown of thorns was when Kathleen gave it to me, looking tiny in comparison. They seem to get along.
I think Kathleen would be pleased that I have kept her plant alive all these years, though she would be dismayed that I still don’t wear neckties. Last summer on a road trip through Florida we drove past the exit for St. Augustine, and I thought of her. And though the crown of thorns has become a part of the scenery in my office again, after its pandemic sojourn to our living room, I still catch sight of it sometimes and smile. If she were still alive, Kathleen would be pushing 110 now, and honestly if she had lived that long I would not have been surprised. It’s a cliché, but I am certain that she went to the end excited to see Madison again. As for me, I am thinking about plans to repot her crown of thorns soon, wondering whether to separate it from the upstart jade plant, satisfied that it enjoys the western light.
Your Crown of Thorns is a living thing with a well enforced personal space. Quite intimidating. I have not heard of this plant.
Good luck repotting. That will be a story as well.