Chapter 20 — What a Cutting Is Allowed to Be
TAMSIN
The first argument concerned a dead phlox cutting.
Denise placed the empty pot in the centre of the community-room table and said Kareem’s bench roof had leaked. Kareem said Denise had watered on a day the compost was already wet. Mrs Ewan inspected the black stem and blamed the plastic pot.
“Who replaces it?” Denise asked.
Tamsin turned the pot over. The drainage holes were clear. Roots had begun and then rotted after the stem base stayed wet.
“No one replaces this cutting,” she said.
Denise frowned. “Then we have one fewer.”
“Yes.”
“What is the network for if plants can just die?”
Around the table sat twelve keepers: phlox at the hall yard, geranium with Mrs Ewan, honesty seed at the school, divisions at two allotments, rescue trays at Leith Groundworks and three cestrum descendants at Dinah’s nursery.
Alder Street needed locally grown plants, but the dead phlox settled the first rule before Tamsin could draw a system around it.
The map would record loss without turning failure into debt. A parent plant stayed with its keeper. Cuttings stayed with the person caring for them, and no card entitled anyone to enter a private garden or collect the adult plant.
“What if someone kills everything?” Kareem asked.
“Then we send ordinary material until the care problem changes,” Tamsin said. “We don’t confiscate what survived.”
Mrs Ewan wanted that on the watering bottle. The school caretaker suggested a constitution and received twelve hostile looks.
They tried one card instead: source, keeper, winter condition and outcome. Kareem asked for fixed watering days. Mrs Ewan pushed a wooden skewer into the dead pot and held up the wet tip.
“Tuesday did not do this any favours.”
The card said check Tuesday and left the decision to the compost. Denise agreed to keep a common geranium before receiving another rare cutting. Her failed phlox remained on the map under the hall-yard code, without her name.
Maeve sat beside the kettle entering the first cards.
She had controlled Leith’s nursery for three weeks without Tamsin moving a pot.
One cestrum cutting remained firm. The layered branch still showed green wood, though its roots had not extended.
Maeve had placed both at different sites so a heater failure could not kill them together.
“Survival rate?” Farah asked.
“For the original six cuttings, sixteen percent so far,” Maeve said. “That can still become zero.”
The room quieted.
Tamsin did not improve the number for comfort. “Softwood cuttings taken under damage and moved in September had poor odds. Spring material from established descendants will do better.”
Dinah had sent her data rather than attending: three parent plants, two healthy, one with cold damage; one rooted layer; no autumn removal; spring propagation possible if each receiving site proved suitable. Her note ended: Do not put all the tender things under one clever roof.
“She means yours?” Kareem asked.
“She means everyone’s.”
Money produced less philosophy and more noise.
The school needed propagation heat; the allotments needed transport; Mrs Ewan wanted cash only if it did not make her doorbell public.
Leith would pay for material used at Alder Street, and the city commission would pay resident hours.
Other consumables went to a rotating pair—one keeper and one project grower—not to Tamsin alone.
Maeve took the first project place. Mrs Ewan volunteered for the other.
“That is almost a committee,” Kareem said.
“Only two chairs,” Mrs Ewan replied. “We can survive it.”
After the meeting, an older woman named June Hales approached Tamsin with a folded photograph. It showed a conservatory crowded by washing and potted plants. In the corner, against brick, stood a cestrum nearly three metres tall.
“Your mother gave my sister this,” June said. “My sister went to Canada. The plant came to me because customs were less accommodating.”
The photograph was dated 2019.
“Is it alive?”
“Unless it died this morning.”
June lived four streets from the community centre.
Her back garden was narrow, and the conservatory roof had three patched panes.
The cestrum grew in open ground where the old floor tiles had been removed.
Its trunk divided low, with one branch trained along the brick wall.
November leaves were sparse but healthy.
Tamsin crouched at the root flare. The plant had made its own layered stems beneath a row of storage boxes. One bore a wooden label in her mother’s blue capitals:
C. NOCTURNUM — LARKSPUR EAST WALL — 2004
The blue strokes had thickened where the nib caught the grain. Her mother always pressed harder on the last digit, as if a date could be made to stay put by force. Tamsin had seen the same hand on seed envelopes at home; she had never expected to find it behind June Hales’s laundry rack.
June set a kettle on the conservatory floor because the kitchen socket was already carrying the heater. “If you’re going to cry, warn me. I’ve only brought two mugs.”
“I’m not.”
“Good. The other one has a crack.”
June’s sister had met Tamsin’s mother at a hospital night-shift garden, where both women complained that the staff courtyard contained three dead conifers and nowhere to sit. The cestrum arrived a week later in a carrier bag lined with newspaper.
“Your mother said it would sulk,” June said. “My sister said she already had one of those at home.”
“Did it?”
“For a year. Then it grew through a shelf.”
June pulled an old photograph from a biscuit tin. Tamsin’s mother stood beside the young plant in a raincoat, one hand shielding her face from the flash. The picture was badly framed. Half a watering can occupied the foreground, and someone’s thumb covered the upper corner.
Tamsin recognised the coat before the face. Its left pocket had once held string, aspirin, seed packets and a dead torch at the same time. She placed the photograph back in the tin rather than asking to keep it.
“You can copy it next time,” June said.
“Only if you still like me in May?”
“That condition applies to the plant. Photographs are negotiable after tea.”
June used the cracked mug herself. They drank beside the heater while the cestrum leaves shifted in the small current from the patched roof.
The lineage predated the destroyed parent plant’s final seventeen years. This was not a cutting from the September rescue. It had grown into its own adult life under another person’s roof.
“We can move the storage boxes,” Tamsin said. “The layered branch will root better with light and fresh substrate.”
June folded her arms. “We?”
“You. If you want.”
“I thought you had come to collect it.”
“No.”
“The company man offered to buy one from a nursery.”
Tamsin kept her attention on the layered stem. That information could refer to the calls Graham made before his boundary notice or to something later; she left the question alone.
“This one stays here,” Tamsin said.
“It was staying anyway.”
“Good.”
June showed her how the plant was protected in winter: bubble insulation along the glass, a small electric heater set above frost and old wool blankets over the roof on the coldest nights. The arrangement was inelegant and had kept the plant alive through two power cuts.
The soil beneath the cestrum contained broken crocks, leaf mould and ordinary garden earth.
A thermometer wired to the wall showed last winter’s minimum at two degrees.
Tamsin measured the trunk and checked the underside of leaves for whitefly.
June stopped her when she reached towards the oldest layered branch.
“Ask before you prod.”
Tamsin withdrew her hand. “May I check where it has rooted?”
“Yes. That one, not the one under the laundry rack.”
The distinction mattered. The plant was not open material because Tamsin understood its biology or recognised her mother’s label.
“It flowers too much in June,” June said. “The smell gets into the bedroom.”
“That is characteristic.”
“It is inconsiderate.”
They cleared one storage box and found roots along twenty centimetres of stem. Tamsin could have lifted the layer now, but November separation would leave little recovery time before winter.
“May I come back in late spring and take one rooted section?” she asked.
“One?”
“One from this branch. You keep the parent and the other layers.”
“Where does it go?”
“We decide then. Not to one central collection.”
June considered. “You can have one if I still like you in May.”
“Reasonable.”
Tamsin wrote a plant card at June’s kitchen table. Current keeper: June Hales. Winter condition: unheated-to-low-heat conservatory, frost protected. Adult plant: not transferable. Spring material: one rooted layer, subject to keeper approval.
For destination, she wrote undecided. Leith Groundworks had controlled humidity, Dinah had better cold-frame experience, and the community yard had more separate hands. The right destination in May would depend on survival elsewhere. Choosing now would only make the card look complete.
June kept the original card. Tamsin took a copy to the community yard.
At Leith Groundworks, Maeve added the lineage to the shared map without a street number visible to general users. Exact addresses stayed with keepers and the two-person care pair.
“Do we count it as surviving Larkspur stock?” Maeve asked.
Tamsin looked at the photograph of the adult plant under patched glass.
“Count it as June’s plant,” she said. “Record the lineage.”
The difference remained on the map.