Happiness plant

Abel has finally bought a happiness tree. Eve wonders why it took him so long.

Eve: It looks the same.

Abel: Believe me. They're not the same. I made a mistake. The happiness plant has soft leaves.

Eve: And the - what do you call it?

Abel: The yucca. Its leaves are harder, spikier, see?

Eve: Well, you can throw out the yucca now you finally bought the right one.

Abel: Can't do that. I've had the yucca for 20 years. He's been through a lot.

Yucca with parallel dogleg stems

You’ve had it for a long while, I think…

The yucca? Oh, Since 1986, that’s twenty years.

And it hasn’t died?

They say you can’t kill a yucca. Although Benny in Denmark says not all species will survive as far north as he lives.

It looks a bit funny.

You mean the parallel dogleg stems? Let me tell you how that happened. I went away for a year during, oh, 1994, it must have been. I put the yucca outside the house, so he’d get some rain sometimes, you understand. During that year the wind blew him down so he lay horizontal to the ground and that’s when he started growing those two shoots up towards the sky.

Ah, so when you came back, you stood him up vertically.

Exactly. And the shoots which had already grown about 20 centimeters up, or sideways, depending on how you looked at him, started growing for the sky again and thus turned 90 degrees back again. That’s why the yucca has these parallel dogleg stems.

You don’t think it looks a bit, well, deformed?

He’s not a regular yucca, I grant you. I know, I tend to anthropomorphize him, but, he has loads more character than most other potted yuccas. I couldn’t give him up, not after all he’s been through.