So I ordered a bur oak from the Arbor Day Foundation around—well—Arbor Day, and then, because I am a depressed unmotivated sack of crap who only goes to work and comes home and naps intermittently until it’s time to go to bed, I left it sitting in a box on my back porch all summer because I am a horrible life-extinguishing gremlin.
Anyhoo. My guilt finally got the best of me and I opened the box a few days ago, and holy shit, the bur oak is STILL ALIVE. He’s been living off the condensation in his plastic-bag-covered pot and whatever weird immortality juices the Arbor Day people put in there, and he even popped a large, albeit pale, leaf. In the day or two since I removed it from the box, it started to send out a couple more much greener leaves.
So I’ve named him Biff because he’s an unstoppable miracle badass specimen of flora, and we planted him in the front yard today. Then I looked up bur oaks to get to know Biff and now it all makes sense. These puppies grow to over 100ft tall and can live up to 400 YEARS.
This guy was just chilling in a plastic bag in a box in my back porch for months, because he *knew* he wasn’t going out like that. He was all “try what you will, puny human, but I’ll still be around when your great-grandchildren are soiling their Depends, and my trunk will eventually grow up to 10 feet in diameter long after your desiccated corpse has pushed its last daisy.”
Either that, or my husband nails him with the lawnmower tomorrow. We shall see.