Naming a plant is a very important step in keeping it alive....

I am the kind of person who not only names a plant but has a thought process behind it. One of my latest namings for example... in my last apartment we had an "un-killable" plant (BTW... my roommates and I had killed 4 "un-killable" plants before this one...) and since this one was dying we decided to take some advice on it and 1) water it and 2) prune it.... so one day about 3 weeks after receiving this advice I finally got around to doing so. Just by cutting off some of the dead stuff (not all...) I reduced the size of the plant by about 2/3. To me I had just given the plant a haircut... a buzz cut to be exact. Then I got to thinking that the plant needed a name... why? who knows... thats just what I thought. I went through my usual names for naming random things, my favorites being George, Fred, and Lucille. But I decided to walk on the wild side and try something new. So I decided that because it now had a buzz cut, it must be a marine.... and then I thought, well I know 3 marines well.... 1 from high school, 1 of my friend's boy friends (neither of which my roommates knew) and the third was a friend of ours, Dathan: so the plant was named after him.

Everyone who hears this long, drawn out story says one of two things: 1) OMG, its just a plant, that was WAY too long of a thought process to name it and/or 2) Dathan isn't a very "marine-y" name... you should rename it something more "marine-y"

Of course after that there was pressure to keep it alive... especially after we told him about it (oh, and did he laugh at me....). I kept it alive for the remainder of the time that we lived together and then lost custody of the plant.... but hey, at least I don't have to worry about keeping it alive anymore.

I now have a cactus which is much more my speed... its name is Spike... original I know.