FINDING BEAUTY in unexpected places...

For at least twenty years I have tended a fiddle leaf ficus that has grown in that time from a scrawny three-foot nursery plant into a mature, fifteen foot indoor giant. It’s botanical name is Ficus pandurata or Ficus lytrata and is commonly known as fiddle-leaf fig. It is native to western Africa, from Cameroon to Sierra Leone. An ancestor of the specimen at my house started life under the canopy in a lowland tropical rainforest. How could I not respect any living thing that has behind it such a history, so when we moved from a house to an apartment fifteen years ago, I found a place for it.

The plant never loses all its leaves at once but drops a few each year in December, January and February. Usually I pick up the leaves as soon as they fall and take them to a place where gardeners in our community gather plants for mulch; but this year one of the magnificent leaves lay hidden for several weeks and was beginning to curl and dry when I found it. It was definitely spent... finished... not good for anything but mulch. As I carried it out to a great pile of leaves bound for mulching, I saw in it a different kind of beauty... different altogether from the robust green and splendid strength of the big leaves that had managed to stay for at least another year in their places on the big ficus. It still has form and color, and it actually has a kind of static movement now that it didn’t have when it was young and vibrant. The way I see it, this leave is still worth at least the time it takes to photograph it.