My Turn: Grandma's houseplants multiply her love

In a sunny spot in my kitchen, near the sliding glass door, sits one of my prized snake plants.

The variegated green, swordlike leaves reach straight up from the floor to the kitchen counter and beyond. Happy in a lovely gray ceramic pot with blue flowers that was my mother’s, this is the oldest of several snake plants in our home. I love them all, not only for their strength and adaptability, but for the memories they evoke.

The house of my childhood and my mother’s before me was an early 20th century farmhouse in upstate New York. Everything about it was ordinary except for one architectural feature: White floor-to-ceiling fluted columns flanking a wide entry from the living room into the music room. Between each set of columns, built-in shelves provided the perfect home for the added elegance of two exotic snake plants tended by the grandmother I never knew.

Months after the plants witnessed my parents’ wedding in 1936 — their walk through the living room, past the stately columns and into the music room to make their vows — Grandma died. With Mom’s loving care, the plants lived on.

When I was born in 1939, they were there to greet me. It is said that snake plants fight evil spirits and negative chi. While life was often chaotic growing up the child of an alcoholic father, I remember only the best of times in that music room under the watchful eyes of those majestic sentries — music from my flute and Mom’s piano, Christmas mornings around the huge live tree filling the middle of the room and Mom tending to her bank of beautiful ferns, begonias and geraniums in the bay window beyond.

When Mom moved to Long Island in 1977, the plant in the blue-flowered pot made the 400-mile trip with her, finding a new home in her apartment upstairs in our Centerport house for the next 26 years. During the last years of Mom’s life, deep in dementia, she forgot how to care for her plants. After her death in 2003, I got it into my head I wanted this plant to thrive as a symbol of the continuation of life. But I doubted I could revive the once healthy specimen, now limp and yellowed.

I gave the plant new soil, replanted it in Mom’s pot, watered it sparingly and placed it out of direct sunlight, but with enough indirect light to help it thrive. Loving its new location, healthy green shoots replaced the old. After 10 years, when the roots of thick, tall spears threatened to burst out of the pot, I divided it into four plants, kept some of it in the same pot and provided new pots for the others.

Five years ago, my daughter and I had a repotting party out on the deck, giving me six plants for our house and two for hers in nearby Huntington. Next in line for descendants of my grandmother’s originals will be my two granddaughters when they are settled in homes of their own.

According to feng shui, to protect a home from bad energy, improve the environment generally and attract wealth, snake plants should be placed in southern or eastern corners of the home. All of my snake plants enjoy a southern exposure in winter. In summer, they thrive outside on our south-facing deck. Occasionally a plant surprises and delights me with a single thin stalk of whitish-green spidery blooms, said to be a sign of good luck. I like to think of them as winks from Grandma and Mom, happy their babies are thriving.

 Jerene Weitman

 Centerport