By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

In my 34-year career as a domestic plant terrorist, I've recorded somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 confirmed kills.

I believe it started with a few toppled ferns when I was first learning to walk. From there the path of mayhem and destruction has grown long and broad.

There were the brittle bromeliads my brother and I sent tumbling during our indoor Nerf basketball tournaments, the not-very-elastic rubber tree in the back yard that I Kikaida-kicked to oblivion, and, oops, the poor cactus I couldn't quite clear playing Evel Knievel on my old Country Cruiser bicycle.

I meant no harm. It's just that the combination of dainty domesticated plant and clumsy, sugar-powered boy has never been a good match.

And, to be sure, there was always an ample supply of flora fodder around the house. My mother inherited my grandmother's love of plants and the two of them would trade scheffleras and seersuckers the way some people swap recipes.

I supposed Mom knew that, secretly, I liked them, too. She never bought the idea that just because I was male, I was incable of nurturing something. In a ongoing effort to turn my brown thumbs green, she'd leave her hardiest, most neglect-proof plants in my care only to retrieve them, dead as chopsticks, weeks later.

Plants were always a comfort for my mother. When she moved the family to Hawai'i after my father died, she made sure we found a house with a garden big enough for all the plants Grandma wanted to give us.

And for those few years when we were able to have houses with gardens, Mom was able to keep a place for herself and her thoughts, a place to lay the weight of being a disabled widow with three children.

Most of the time, all she had was that golden hour after she came home from work, before the sun went down, to sit on her little stool and bury her hands in the dirt. But the harvest of those quiet moments overflowed our home.

A half-dozen back surgeries ended Mom's career as an occupational therapist, and the cost of all those hospital stays and prescription drugs eventually took away her gardens.

Still, she always managed to keep a few things green and flowering in the apartments where she spent her last few years. With her bones as thin as wafers from osteoporosis and her organs slowly failing from scleroderma, she surrounded herself with the few house plants she was able to take with her and the little dollar specials she found at the supermarket. Every so often, she'd send me home with a small cactus or crassula, still holding out for a miracle.

When Mom died, two years ago this month, alone in a small senior-housing apartment on Kina'u Street, I distributed most of her plants to friends and relatives I knew could take care of them. But I also saved a few for myself — a couple of young ti plants, a ponytail palm, a devil's ivy, a heart-leaf philodendron, and an aralia.

The philodendron did wonderfully for about a year, then abruptly died. The aralia took ill earlier this year, and was sent off to more capable hands. But the others — despite some scary repotting moments — are doing great.

If she'd only lived to see the day.