RIP, PamPlant

Two summers ago—if we can stretch the imagination so that right now counts as summer—I planted a Lantana bush/shrub at the waterfront park in Red Hook (adjacent to the barge-museum and pier) on the second memorial of my mom’s death. By sprinkling it with Chardonnay my partners and I christened it the PamPlant. I try to do something commemorative like this on her memorials. On the first one, I got a tattoo on the way to the airport; then the plant; and last year was a big dinner.

As I planted the PamPlant, I was expecting that it might count as vandalism, prepared for it to be pulled up or mowed over or otherwise violated. But to my good fortune a groundskeeper was there. His command of English was not great, but he nodded yes when I made gestures with the plant and the shovel, and he didn’t stop me when I broke ground. I probably planted it a little late to expect much flowering action that first summer, because I realized the next year that early summer is the Lantana’s prime time. Around mid-June, it got big and a blinding shade of crimson. And then it slowly faded into a sagebrush looking thing as the summer wore on. During that spring and summer I ideally visited twice or three times a week (it was very easy when I lived two blocks away), and it was a lovely thing to behold as I approached it from the park entrance. It kept getting bigger and redder and more amazing—until, of course, it peaked, and at that point it wasn’t as fun to visit but I would anyway. I situated the PamPlant next to a bench that directly faces the Statue of Liberty, and while the Statue is not my ideal focal point, the water (which admittedly rustled up mostly trash) and the bell buoys and the ship sounds and the seagulls and the wind and the Staten Island and Governor’s Island profiles in the foreground (and Jersey in the background) and the Verazzano Bridge off in the distance (often clouded over appealingly, like the Golden Gate Bridge) and what I came to realize was the Buttermilk Channel framing everything—it all made for a mini-haven that, by virtue of my having discovered it, I could lay claim to. (This picture was taken later in the summer, when the red began to fade to orange.)


Well, it’s gone now. I went to water the PamPlant yesterday afternoon to find that it had been dug up and leveled over. And for about two minutes, I thought it was the worst possible thing that could have ever happened, especially with dreaded Mother’s Day approaching (I hate Mother’s Day, even if it is just a Hallmark holiday). “This too!?” I said. How many times—how many—had I approached the park with caution, bracing myself for the possibility of it having been removed? And this time, I was practically galloping my way in, relishing the fact that PamPlant’s prime time was coming. It had only been three days since I last visited!


I guess this means that the PamPlant now has its place on the bookshelf, which is to say, it has a beginning and end. I was already processing it this way once my dumb shock wore in. The two people who helped me plant it are both gone: Kathryn moved to Hong Kong, and though this doesn’t mean she died, the immediacy as it relates to me did; and then my ex-boyfriend, you know, died his own figurative death (everything is subjective, see; everything is dead or dying). The whole thing reeked of a very logical “the end.”

And what is it about planting stuff to commemorate dead things? We think that by giving life to something else, the memory of the dead thing will live on, selectively overlooking the fact that the new life is going to die, too. After the real end of my relationship (the not-real end was prolonged and endlessly un-final), I planted some pansies in a window flower box outside my bedroom, thinking absently that this was a way of finalizing, letting go, commemorating the good, whatever, only to find, now four weeks later, that the pansies keep blooming shriveled up wads of dead flower petals. Maybe the point is that I should just stick with food and tattoos as my commemorative media.

When this kind of stuff happens, I like to imagine what was happening at the exact same time—like, for cosmic balance purposes, it is comforting to imagine that mom’s friend Leslie clicked send on this photo when the PamPlant’s roots were breaking free. (Mom is the one in the great coat.)


And with all that said, I’m going to now propose that this is all an unsolved mystery. What exactly is that little shadow—like, a chalk outline from a crime scene—of a flower pot? Did someone steal the PamPlant?