SO PHOEBE LINDEN, the bird behavior expert, was telling us to get a ficus tree for our birds to play in. Only $20 at Home Depot, as some kind lady who sat next to me at the luncheon said. Nothing to it!

The Monday after returning home from Phoebe's seminar in Pittsburgh, I headed over to Home Depot. I did not know exactly what a ficus tree looked like. I wandered over to the "foilage assortment" display and finally came upon something called a Snow Ficus.

Two tiny little trees, plants really, with white-centered leaves. Way too small for the two birds I had at the time: Charlie, my brown-headed parrot, and maybe even Sugar Franklin, a cockatiel. But it was a start. I touched one of the trees and approximately 40 leaves fell off.

I glanced around to see if any of the staff had witnessed this phenomenon, but I was safe. So safe, in fact, that I had to walk over to plumbing to find someone to help me.

Eventually, some guy about 14 years old led me back to the "foilage assortment" display and pulled out a ficus (or, as the tag said, fig tree). It was perhaps four feet tall and had maybe 20 leaves on it. "This is all we have left," he told me, "but there's another shipment due any day now."

"Ah," I said, considering the dry potted earth as yet another leaf drifted to the floor. "Are they all about this size?"

"You can get bigger," he assured me, not realizing I was more interested in bushiness than height. "Just call us later today to see if the new ones have come in yet."

I said I would, made a mental note never to call them again, and headed over to Lowe's.

Lowe's, unlike Home Depot, is famous for never, ever having anyone available to help you do or find anything, including checking out. But they do have a slightly larger greenhouse. I spied a pleasant-loooking woman near the light bulbs and trapped her. "I need a ficus tree," I said, looking as pitiful as possible.

"Well, sure," she said, very politely. That should have been a warning. She led me to the greenhouse and a huge display of trees that she assured me were ficuses.

"It's for my parrots," I told her, as if every customer that came in had parrots and ficus trees were created for them. She smiled and took a tentative step backward.

"So which of these are good ficus trees? And how would I know?" She hmmmm'd for a moment and said, "You know, actually I'm just a vendor. Let me get you a clerk." At that point I noticed that she did have a label on her coat that said, "Vendor." My heart sank because I knew she would disappear and I would be left standing there until closing time.

But the home-improvement store gods were smiling on me and a real live Lowe's clerk appeared. She was the garden specialist and told me that whichever ficus tree I got would immediately be traumatized and lose much of its leaves and that when I repotted, it would lose even more. She showed me the $45 ficus trees and asked if I was interested in braided ornate trunks.

"Uh, just something simple for my parrots," I said. She frowned and said perhaps the "sale" ficus might be more suitable, though she doubted they could hold a parrot.

"They're small parrots," I told her. "Just something for them to play in."

She ignored this additional bit of information and watched while I pulled out a specimen about 4 1/2 feet tall that seemed to have most of its leaves.

It also seemed to be L-shaped. I asked the clerk about this and she assured me that it was the pot that was crooked. To prove this, she wiggled the pot back and forth. It was only $6.96, so I felt pleased at getting such a bargain. I also got a bigger pot to repot it so that it could be doubly traumatized all at once. Altogether, my purchase was less than $12.

I lugged the tree and pot out to my Geo Prism and opened the back door. To get the tree to fit inside, I had to remove junk from the back floorboard, put the tree on the floor, and gently bend the top half. Several leaves fell off during this process.

I went immediately home, reversing the process of bending the tree to get it out of the car, causing several more leaves to fall off.

After getting the tree inside, I realized I had no room in my house for a tree. Even my parrots knew this -- they watched in horror from the safety of their cages as I carefully put down newspaper and placed the tree here and there, over on that side and this, perhaps if I moved the lamp...

Several leaves fell off during this process.

I had part of a big bag of dirt left over from my last failed attempt at gardening, so I put some of that into the new pot, stuck the tree in, and put the rest of the bag of dirt on top of it.

I stood back to admire my work and saw that the tree was still L-shaped and bent at a 45 degree angle -- even though it was now in a new, non-wobbly pot. I rearranged the dirt to shore up the "weak" side, but the tree still leaned, as if determined to provide its own awning.

Several leaves fell off during this process.

I ended up putting the tree, at its jaunty slant, between the finch's cage and the television. I added some water to the pot, which immediately ran out over the brim of the collection pan, onto the five layers of newspaper, and into my carpet. I spent the next 20 minutes blotting up water, changing newspapers, and considering a better place to put the tree.

Perhaps in the study, I thought. I lugged the now-50-pound tree into the study and then realized that the room was too dim during the day when I'm at work. So back into the living room, beside the TV. My neck had been bothering me for several days and lifting and moving the tree was sending my nerve endings into number 14 on the 1-to-10 pain scale.

I sat down to assess the damage and swallow a handful of ibuprofen. This was the point at which both Charli and Sugar Franklin let me know in no uncertain terms that they did not like this tall, oddly slanted thing in the living room. They peered at it from the farthest reaches of their cages, squawked several times, and kept looking at me. Would I move it again?

I took them out of their cages, put them on my shoulder, and stood a respectful distance from the tree. "This is your tree," I told them. "Pretty soon you'll be playing in its branches and having a wonderful time." They shrank back further on my shoulder.

Over the next few weeks, the birds watched me carefully vacuum up clods of dirt around the ficus and saw that it did not move or attack me.

Sugar Franklin took a tentative nibble on one of the leaves and discovered that she liked it.

The ficus tree, of course, dropped several of its leaves in response.

The other day Carl, this kindly retired man who's taken pity on my pitiful yard and does gardening for me at greatly reduced rates, stopped by to pick up a check. 

I pointed out the ficus tree in the living room, still leaning over from the weight and trials of having dropped almost all of its leaves, and asked him if it was dead yet. He fingered the bare branches and snapped one off.

Carl said that ficus trees were awfully hard to keep. I showed him how the soil was still damp, despite the pot draining properly and me not having watered it in several weeks. He shook his head sadly. Best to let it go, he said.

After he left, I gave the tree a good shake and took it out on the back deck to brave the cold weather. I didn't have the heart to just throw it out. Not yet.

So there it sits outside my kitchen window, mocking me with its one or two bright green leaves flapping in the wind. The wild birds that visit my bird feeder avoid it, too, just as my indoor birds did. 

Marguerite Floyd is a hospital documentation manager, but considers her real job to be bossee of two cockatiels, Sugar Franklin and Flash, and a 3 1/2-year-old brown-headed parrot named Charli.

ParrotChronicles.com

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