Phil: The true story of an incredible house plant

In 1995, I moved into my very own house in Boulder, Colo. One of the first things I did was buy myself a little philodendron. I hung it from a wooden beam at the edge of the kitchen, and over the two years I lived there, one choice tendril grew along that beam until it made a perfect little curl on the other side. I named him Phil.

When I graduated, the plant went with my college boyfriend Jason Wilson, whom I was supposed to move in with after a summer of travel. Sometime during that first post-grad summer, however, I decided I didn't want to play house and — on a whim — I moved back east to Maryland to work on a farm, leaving the plant with him.

Somehow, Phil survived that first winter. It was a feat given that the cabin he lived in was heated with wood and often went cold. Few living things prospered in that house after the breakup. But, eventually, the ex-boyfriend found a new girlfriend, Annie, and she helped Phil along, bringing him back from the brink of death.

That following spring, in March 1998, I returned to Colorado (realizing I had made a big mistake in leaving — are you noticing a theme?).

I had remained friends with Jason and Annie, and in the summer of 1999, when I bought my house in Leadville, they came to visit me on my very first night and brought me Phil. Still in his original light blue pot, his long tendril had vanished but his core was intact and healthy.


I hung him from a wooden beam at the entrance to the kitchen, and slowly a new tendril began to loop up and down over nails I had tacked into the wood beam.

In 2002, when Scott and I decided — on a whim, of course — to take a fourth-month sabbatical in Virginia, we left Phil in the good hands and green thumb of my pal "Sarahgirl."

When we realized that the mud-season getaway was going to last longer than we initially figured, we sold the house and moved everything we owned to Virginia. We granted Sarahgirl permanent custody of Phil.

So, when we pulled up the stakes last fall and moved BACK to Colorado — on a whim — one of our first road trips was out to visit our pal Sarahgirl, who now lives on a funky farm with three children, two dogs, three cows, a cat, 10 chickens and an occasional llama or two. Sitting in her kitchen sipping a beer after we arrived, I looked up on top of her kitchen cabinets and saw a philodendron that had literally TAKEN OVER the entire corner of her kitchen.

It couldn't be, I thought. Is that . . . Phil? Too good to be true, it was. I shed tears. I hugged his curly little arms and kissed his shiny leaves.

Sarahgirl clipped me off a few tendrils, and I have been trying to get them to sprout roots in water for the past six months. One tendril thrived, and I just transplanted it into a pot with these mums. (The butterfly pot, incidentally, I received from my dad on my 21st birthday).

So here I am, back in Colorado for the third time, 15 years later, with a piece of that very same plant I started growing when I was 21 in a butterfly pot I got from my dad that same year. Now, how cool is THAT! Life really does come full circle. Especially, it seems, for me.