From Roy Blount Jr.

Houseplants are bored and need emotional sustenance. That's the conclusion reached by Amanda Fleece, a forensic botanist at the University of Rochester, after she lost patience with a droopy ficus in her apartment. "It had been a fairly happy plant before," she told the Rochester Herald Leader, "but it wilted. I gave it water, plant food, new soil. Nothing helped. So I yelled at it: 'You're a plant! What in the hell do you want from me? Blood?' I could actually see the ficus perk up, on the spot. So I mooned it. It perked up further." Over the next several days, Fleece sang bawdy songs to the ficus, decked it in Christmas-tree tinsel, and threatened to send it away to military school. It soon had doubled in size. "Wouldn't you get blue," says Fleece, "if you stood around all day in a pot? All my houseplants are flourishing, now that I'm feeding them some drama."