Watered the oleander today.
It's an Indian summer this year. Normally when October creeps up, the bushes forsake their fleshy shoots which, in warm months, blossom into flowers. Today they are full, still green, still spongy with the softness of a flower's internal hardware. To a biologist, sexual reproduction is a mechanism of unity, of male and female. Plants inseminate through intermediaries. Bees' legs, wind. Sex cells chance-borne across the landscape: this is what we have to thank for foliage.
Biology thinks of reproduction in terms of cells. Cells are concrete. DNA exchanging and combining in microscopic dances of protein and acids. By scanning the probability clouds of electrons, you can watch it happen — provided you have either thousands of dollars or access to a university laboratory.
But to an aesthetician, sexual reproduction is a mechanism of desire. Oleander shoots swell with the seasons, tumescent in the light of Spring. And have you ever observed the delicate symmetry of an orchid's petals? They are flushed, shaped in a pose of openness, imitating the psychological cues of higher animals: supple shape and symmetry. But the couplings of mammals are sloppy compared to those of flowers. You can't know desire until you have reached with your branches, willing that insects, the currents of air itself, will take part of you to your mate.
Next time you're lonely, think of flowering plants.
Winter eventually will come, and the shoots and flowers will wither and fall away. The oleander will wait through another freeze, untouched. Even in spring, weeds grow everywhere except the soil around an oleander.
For all their delicate flowering, oleander bushes are consummately toxic. Even water which has been touched by its roots is poison.
These plants grow quickly, so take this warning — never plant them in front of windows. Every two months I find myself on a stepladder, garden shears in hand, prepping for the upcoming job by working the rust out of the hinges from sedentary months in the shed.
Soon after that, I'm working the shears for an altogether more organic, and much more sinister reason: they're gummed up with oleander sap. These shears are long enough and sharp enough to pierce a chest if fallen upon, and unknown numbers of people have frozen dead days after being pierced with rust.
Tetanus is a disease of muscles. Oxidized iron is a notoroious stomping ground for virus, but more than anywhere it's found in plain old dirt. Oleander grows in clay, on dry stream beds. My grandfather kept a garden for decades; he handled dirt all day. Before that he was a soldier. Before that he grew up on a Cuban farm when people still gave birth to a dozen children, hoping to rear six. But he didn't die of hunger, or horsekick, or gunshot, or tetanus — or old age, which became a larger and larger specter as he aged into his eighties. His organs burst from a fall in his own hallway.
My fear — however paranoid — is of the sap, of this bush exacting some absurd chance-based form of revenge. The cut branches ooze oleander blood, white and alien, and sway in the breeze, waiting. The price is high for sun in the windows. They say men have died after eating food cooked on oleander skewers.
Oleandrin is named after oleander. It's a cardiac glycoside — cardiac naturally meaning heart. Some CH2, a pinch of H2C, as well as the obligatory naked bits of Hydrogen and Oxygen. Its actions produce both beneficial and toxic results in the heart. Cardiac muscle is made of prodigiously strong fibers, in turn are made of H2O, Carbon, and a jumbleheap of other elements in relatively forgettable amounts.
Oleander breathes carbon dioxide: CO2. Talk to plants to make them happy, not for the rippling air of your voice's sound, but by the product refined by your lungs' use of air.
Remembering DNA, dances of proteins and acids. Low-weight atoms combining to make a heart to pump blood, or to make oleandrin, which will destroy.
On average, diamonds are two to three billion years old, having spent the bulk of their lives simmering under great pressure near the border between Earth's crust and mantle. The lesson: squish carbon in a furnace without air through numerous geological epochs, and you've got an engagement ring. Yank it out of the ground cool, you've got coal. Burn coal without air, you've got charcoal.
My sister was beaming when she showed me her engagement ring — a diamond nearly the size of a viagra tablet, set in platinum. Outside, the oleander bushes, more carbon, swayed. She explained that her heart has nearly stopped when he proposed.
Carbon and the movement of the heart are like siblings.
Sources
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleander
Floridata
http://www.floridata.com/ref/N/nerium/cfm