I knew it wasn’t happy just by the way it looked. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Get to the root of the problem”, and this applies to plants and humans. If they’re not vibrant on the outside, there’s something going on inside at the root.

This plant and I have history, so I had to figure out why it had stopped blooming. I bought it over a year ago and wrote about it here and yes, it’s the same plant I saved one night back in January from sudden freezing temps. It may be too late in the season for it to bloom again, but it hasn’t produced any blooms for a couple of months, so something wasn’t right. My first guess was it’s run out of room in the pot, so I began slipping a small shovel along the inside of the wall, going all the way around to loosen the dirt and roots from the sides before lifting it out of the pot.

After that, it came out easily and I saw the problem. The roots had multiplied to the point where it had run out of dirt to grow in. There was just a fine layer in the bottom of the vessel and the roots were attached/wrapped around what I had placed in there for drainage as in a desperate attempt to find more dirt.

I laid it on the ground and at first glance I thought I was going to have to go buy a larger pot, but this pot is huge and I didn’t really want one any bigger. By gently untangling the roots, and removing what wasn’t beneficial anymore, the plant was back to normal size and would easily fit into the vessel. I added a fresh layer of dirt to the bottom and around the sides, so the plant looks happy again.

There’s a time to bloom and a time to grow, but without growth there’s little support for blooming. We don’t have to be blooming to be growing, but we can prepare the soil by first giving ourselves the room to grow.