Below is a rewrite of my essay, "Growing Jade Plants." Does it give my readers enough guidance about its meaning?

 

GROWING JADE PLANTS 

 

I started my jade plant collection twelve years ago at a family dinner. My mother, a devoted gardener, had grown a gaggle of jade plants and installed them in the dining room’s bay window long before her death a year earlier.

 

Her jade plants’ dark brown limbs and deep green fleshy leaves were outlined by the bright white of the ledge on which they rested. The largest plant stretched wider than the biggest platter my parents had ever displayed on their elegant dinner table. It captured my fancy with its wildly twisted tree-like branches reminiscent of a Japanese bonsai tree. I was also taken with the cluster of smaller plants, huddled closely as though seeking safety in the shadow of their mother plant. I missed my mother, who had always held out her arms to me.

 

But Mom had effectively lost her mother when Mom was twenty-two years old.  In 1948, she made the long trip by ocean liner from Johannesburg, South Africa to the United States to visit relatives. The jade plant also is an emigrant. It, too, came from South Africa, like so many other robust succulents.

 

I carried my cutting home nestled in a bed of paper towels. Then I placed it in a paper cup filled with water and waited for roots to sprout.

 

Mom hadn’t planned to stay in the United States, but she didn’t even visit South Africa for more than thirty years after she arrived in this country. She married my father, whom she met at her aunt’s home, she bore two children, and she took pleasure in the garden outside the house I lived in from the end of first grade until I left for college. Perhaps she found solace there for her loss of her mother.

 

My mother tried to get me to help her in the garden, but I fled in horror the first day. An earthworm oozed into view shortly after I stuck my fingers into the soil. Boys at my elementary school threw dead earthworms at unwary girls when a rainstorm left them stranded atop the nubby blacktop. The first time that happened, I cringed, then ran for shelter in a teacher’s orbit. I wouldn’t willingly place myself near those creepy crawlers. However, as an adult, I was willing to take a chance on house plants in sterile potting soil.

 

I had rooted spider plants before, but never a jade. I anxiously watched the progress of my cutting. When it took root, I felt happy, as if I’d seen a baby grow into a healthy toddler against all odds. I pulled out my yellow plastic bucket of potting soil and the child-sized shovel with which I’d welcome my plant into its first pot.

 

The potting succeeded. At first the new buds of fat green leaves protruded delicately like the tip of a tongue. Then they pushed out more decisively. Before long, they reached high into the air like my mother’s roses twirling around a white wooden trellis outside our home’s back door.

 

My mom had done most of the outdoor work at home. Pruning roses and other shrubs couldn’t daunt a woman who wrestled a testy gas-powered lawnmower. She cut decisively and confidently.

 

I dithered before I took pruning shears to my child for the first time. I felt as if I was lopping off one of its limbs. But my jade plant came back with two new branches where one had been.

 

Once I felt confident that my plant’s regeneration wasn’t a freak of nature, I got hooked on growing more plants from cuttings. Now I’ve got about half a dozen plump green children, each throwing out branches. Like Mom, they were transplants, setting down roots far from home. Like me, they could set down roots even after getting cut off from Mom.

 

My success at rooting jade plants inspired me to start gardening outdoors. Now when I see worms, I smile because they’re aerating compost bins that feed my garden. Mom’s jade plants led me to a happier view of the world.