Within three weeks of the transplant, it greeted me with an incredible flower, brilliant red, five perfect petals opening to the morning. It was only then that I realized this plant was a hibiscus. And that it had something to teach me about tending living things. We lived in rural New England, and those beautiful red blooms were a treasure during the cold dark days of winter. The hibiscus accompanied us when we moved from a house by a river to a house by a field and finally, in a most unexpected change of lifestyle, to a house in a subdivision in central New Jersey.
New Jersey is something like a crowded pot.
A small state crammed with people, automobiles, condominiums, corporate parks, and shopping malls, there is too much of everything man-made here. New Jersey is a seriously overcrowded pot with all the problems of overcrowding, and it was here in New Jersey that disaster struck the hibiscus. In the beginning it was just a couple of tiny white flies. The plant had lived through many seasons. I was sure it would peacefully co-exist with these little specks of insect life.