Grow Down!
Once again last holiday season, as we have for nearly 30 years, my wife Mary and I decorated a large potted palm as our Christmas tree. It’s the only kind of Christmas tree our 26-year-old daughter ever knew in our home growing up, and it’s become a bit of a family tradition with us.
Only issue with these palms is, they always outgrow their pots. Increasing the size of the pot only works for a little while, after which more upsizing is impractical. After the palm reaches that threshold, I resort to root pruning.
It might seem a little drastic to yank a beloved houseplant out of its pot and hack about half its roots off with a hatchet, but that’s exactly what I do. You could say it’s another annual tradition. It’s necessary. The reason is simple: the potted palm is trying to produce new fronds. But for that to happen, the plant also has to grow downward. The two processes are physiologically linked in plants. If the downward growth of the plant is impeded, the top growth will eventually be stunted, too.
By root pruning, I relieve the immediate constraint on downward root growth not by enlarging the size of the pot but instead by reducing the size of the root ball. In basic terms, I buy a few more years of “growth” by tricking the palm into thinking it has more space to grow down into.
Naturally, however, this only postpones the inevitable. I’m dealing with a tree-sized plant here, so eventually, the balance between root mass and leaf mass will even out. By the end of our time with the first palm we owned, it had only two gigantic fronds grazing the cathedral ceiling of our living room. The two giant leaves was all the pot could support. Of course it didn’t look as lush and full as when it had multiple, smaller fronds. So I bought a new little palm tree and started again. The genetic potential of the plant species I was working with became clear years ago when I looked out the second-floor window of a hotel in Southern California where we were staying and recognized that the palms rising past it were the same kind as the one in our living room. These guys get big. One can only thwart that kind of genetic potential for so long.
If you’re a regular reader here and you sense a metaphor coming, well, guess what? You’re not going to be disappointed. There’s truth in the popular book title from my youth, Plants are Like People, written by Jerry Baker. In fact, you and I work on the same basic DNA-driven operating system as plants do. That’s why plants make things like vitamin C, carbohydrates and other things that keep people alive. Plants make them mainly because they need them.
So it’s worth paying attention to how plants live. They have things to teach us. To grow up, they grow down. Inhibit or block downward growth and you will ultimately inhibit upward growth, sometimes even damaging a plant forever. I’ve seen this happen repeatedly with volunteer tomatoes that sprout in our garden and never experience root confinement of any kind. Very often, they out-perform the ones I so lovingly tend and often unintentionally maim for life by starting them in pots indoors.
Way back in my teens I belonged to the Ann Arbor Bonsai Society. I suggest you enter “bonsai” in your favorite Internet search engine and look at the shallow pots they use. Growing trees in shallow pots is one way bonsai enthusiasts thwart the upward expression of a tree’s genetic potential: they contain its downward growth. Once I realized that the reason bonsai is so hard to do is because it’s contrary to nature, I stopped. And then I wondered about what kind of people would identify with these intentionally tortured little trees. Do we see ourselves in them? Had I?
I now suspect so. But I don’t want to be a bonsai’d person. I want to fully express my genetic potential insofar as this is still possible at my stage of development. And one important clue about how to achieve this is probably getting obvious to my astute readers: Just like plants, if we wanna really grow up, we gotta grow down.
So in the long run we probably need to do better than to trick ourselves that we can really continue to grow forever in our same pots, like I do every year with our palm tree. Confinement is confinement. And really, when it comes right down to it, keeping potted plants, and potted tropical plants here in Michigan in particular, is really kind of nuts. It’s an act of hubris, though I guess a minor one in a culture that seems to have forgotten its historical roots in Greek mythology, where hubris inevitably leads to divine comeuppance. Still, as is typical, such acts of hubris have been so normalized as to become invisible. Separating the plant from its environment was the "original sin,” so to speak. Once that happens, much like putting a bird in a cage, we have to take on all kinds of management tasks to keep it alive that would have otherwise been unnecessary. Root pruning — which often registers as a pretty extreme and possibly slightly crazy intervention when I tell people about it — is only necessary because something more fundamentally crazy has already happened: a tree is growing in a pot. Once we normalize doing one crazy thing, the next crazy thing we need to do because of the first crazy thing we already did soon becomes normalized, too. Crazy things like hacking at a tree’s roots to keep it alive.
And thus it goes. In humans, this is what we call “culture”. Every culture starts out adaptive and more or less functional, or the people would die. But every culture has its blind spots, and these ultimately constrain and effectively “pot” that culture. Yes, cultures tend to be unified not only by their vision but by their blindnesses.
Sometimes I have put a potted plant outside in the yard for the summer and noticed it seemed to get a lot healthier. Then come fall I try to pick it up and find that the reason it’s healthier is that its roots found their ways through the hole in the bottom of the container and into deeper ground.* No wonder it’s better off: It found a way out of its culture container. Can people do something similar? Seems in many place like I’m observing people trying.
Here’s a few ideas of what that might look like: Our culture is all about the mind, brain and head. To counter that, we can grow into awareness and expression through physical sensation, muscle, bone and body, the knowledge of our insides. Likewise, our culture seems to quite often disregard and/or override people’s subjective emotional experience. We can fix that. To grow more deeply into life, we can grow into awareness and expression of our feeling selves, then grow into awareness of our inner connection with all things, including the deeper layers of our own being. We can feel into deeper levels of relaxation, sleep, dreams, and reverie. We can also reach new peaks of exertion, focus, and effort as we overcome resistance to our growth. And what about our relationships with others? How deep can they go?
My sense as I grow in any of these directions is that it starts to feel like being more fully alive.
It’s springtime here in the northern hemisphere. Those who tend to notice such things are now bedazzled by the flowerings of trees. So my question is, can we do it, too? And my answer is, yes, of course! We’re related, those tree beings and us human beings! That’s probably why they feed us, and in so many different ways.
So then my next question is: How can we root more deeply into life this year so that our flowerings can likewise shine so abundantly upon this lovely planet?
*Of course, being out of the container of the house is a big help, too. And this also applies to people. Try it!