When I decided to move the foxtail fern out of the house, on the grounds that it is apparently toxic to cats and sheds a lot of needles even if kept out of reach, I did not realize what a fight I would have to reclaim the pretty pot I had planted it in.

First I tried to wiggle it out of the pot dry. It resisted–strongly. So I thought perhaps watering it would help ease it out. That may have been a huge mistake. The plant continued to remain firmly fixed in the pot, despite my sticking wooden skewers along the edges and wiggling them in an attempt to loosen the roots. I pulled. Not the slightest movement.

I got my husband involved. He stuck a sharp trowel in, moving it around as I had done the skewers, trying not to scrape the glazed interior of the nice pot that I wanted to save. But the trowel wouldn’t go in very far, so finally he pulled out the weapon of last resort–a butcher knife with a slightly curved end–and proceeded to cut the plant out. (By this time I was mainly concerned with saving the pot, not the plant.)

Success! We reached in to find out how the plant had stuck itself so thoroughly to the pot, and found that the remaining roots came out easily. They weren’t attached at all–they were just well and truly packed in there. Watering the plant had, if anything, caused the water-storing tubers to expand and wedge the plant in even more tightly.

To understand, see the loosened mass of roots and tubers that I pulled out of the pot after the drastically root-trimmed plant had been put in a different (and slope-sided) pot.

It’s hard to imagine it fitting in there.

As a side note, I do generally prefer a bit of slope to the sides of a pot. I dislike pots where the rim comes inward at the top and makes it more difficult to tip out a pot-bound plant. But the terra-cotta pot in question had perfectly straight sides, so I wasn’t expecting a battle.

I shall now put the plant out on the porch, where the cats are not allowed. We’ll see whether it survives its drastic pruning, and if so, how it manages the rest of the winter. It’s February–there’s supposed to be some winter still to go, whatever the blooming daffodils think.

Till next post.