Twenty-five years ago while visiting our daughter Elizabeth in St. Louis, we obtained a cutting from a magnificent house plant she told us it was an “Einstein’s Begonia”. My green-thumbed wife nursed it to maturity; since her death it has survived my stewardship and become quite impressive. The original plant is now nearly three feet tall with lovely foliage. Last summer it exploded with brilliant red blossoms. The process of careful pruning and transplanting cuttings has produced several other mature plants. Curiosity led me to investigate its heritage, generating a very interesting story.
In 1926 an amateur botanist in California named Eva Kenworthy Gray hybridized two begonias, a Brazilian variety known as Begonia aconitifolia and one from Lucerne, Switzerland named Begonia coccinea Lucerna, producing a lovely new variety. It was immediately nicknamed “angel wing” because of the shape of its leaves. The green leaves are often speckled, polka-dotted, or coated with metallic silver, with soft red undersides that seem to glow in the sunlight. The plant is characterized by its thick stems and vibrant colors. When it blooms, it produces thick clusters of red and white blossoms. Its botanical name is Begonia Corallina de Lucerna.
We speculate that one of the eminent scientists in Southern California (Theodore von Karman or John von Neuman, perhaps) delivered a specimen of this variety to their associate, Albert Einstein, in Princeton, where it immediately became his favorite plant. When Einstein died in 1955, his mature plant was occupying a well-deserved space on his desk. His longtime personal secretary and housemate Helen Dukas inherited the plant and began to distribute cuttings to his fellow physicists and mathematicians in the Princeton academic community.
In the 1980s two eminent classics scholars, Bob Lamberton and Susan Rotroff, on the Princeton faculty lived in the neighborhood where Einstein had resided. They were recipients of a cutting from a descendant of the Einstein begonia which they nurtured and took with them to St. Louis when they became members of the Classics faculty at Washington University in 1995. In 2000 Elizabeth arrived at “Wash U” after completing her doctorate at Stanford. Her first home in St. Louis was in their lovely Victorian house near Forest Park, where she spent a year “house-sitting” while they were off in Europe on sabbatical. On a visit there we took a cutting from the Lamberton/Rotroff plant and brought it home. Twenty five years later it is alive and thriving.
Nan was a master house plant gardener, a talent she obviously had inherited from her mother. Her collection of house plants was extensive. Our house has spacious bay windows facing south in both living room and dining room, an ideal location for house plants. In addition, the patio behind the house is a perfect venue for the plants in the summer. Each year the act of moving the plants outside in the Spring and bringing them back inside for the winter has been a major project. Their pots all have holes in the bottom, requiring bases under them when they are indoors. My biggest challenge each Fall is to locate the bases and match them with the proper pots. Some of the plants appear to prosper outside in the summer; this is particularly true of the Einstein’s Begonia. By now I have four large mature specimens of them that have managed to survive my benign neglect since my wife died.
That isn’t true of some of the other plants she left in my keeping. Her healthy, bushy Christmas cacti have deteriorated into spindly plants with only a handful of buds. “Franklin”, a magnificent Cholla (?) cactus has finally died. When my younger daughter, Sara, was a teen-ager she and her mother bought a tiny cactus at a garage sale. When it immediately prospered and began to get tall, they named it
Franklin. In a few years its single spike reached the dining room ceiling. We cut off the upper four feet and stuck it in a pot. This was repeated several times; I think the total height reached twenty feet. At some point Franklin and its children were attacked by a fungus, which Nan fought valiantly with a variety of antiseptics. I have lacked her fortitude and now all my Franklins are gone. Fortunately, Sara has a Franklin offspring that is thriving in Colorado.
In contrast, our jade plants have prospered despite my husbandry. They tend to send off large branches that must be pruned frequently. These cuttings don’t require rooting in water – just stick them in a pot and you have another jade plant. As a consequence I currently have twenty-four jade plants! Every time I get the urge to throw some of them out, I shake my head and relent, knowing my wife would be upset if she were aware of my folly. What I really should do is selectively prune them and throw away the cuttings.
This Fall I purposedly took cuttings from our mature Einstein’s Begonias and started small plants, which I gave to the members of our Book Club this week, along with provenance documents for the plant. It certainly is impressive to realize that these tiny plants are legitimate descendants of a plant that was precious to Albert Einstein. If we assume that Bob Lamberton and Susan Rotroff got the cutting for their plant from someone who had received a cutting from Helen Dukas, my plants are the great-great-grandchildren of the very plant that Einstein nurtured. That connection may not be able to compete with the famous expression, “I shook the hand of the man who shook the hand of John L. Sullivan”, but it’s not bad.
The Einstein’s Begonia cult began in the scientific academic community at Princeton, spread to academics at elite universities across the country, and now boasts a much broader cohort, including the YRBRC (Youngwood Road Book Review Club). I wonder how many third cousins my plants have.