I think that my basil plant is gay. It’s not that he’s been lurking about on gayplants.com or anything like that (not that I know of, anyway).

I bought the plant at the grocery store about six weeks ago. It was one of those hydroponic plants that they sell in plastic, with the roots in water–the idea being that this will keep the plant fresh until you’re ready to use it. They were on sale for less than the ones in the garden section, and the plants were much larger, so I took it home and planted it in dirt to see if it took — and it did.

So, last weekend it was sunny and warm, one of those sunny and warm days that makes you want to open the windows and air the house out from winter. I put the basil plant and the poinsettia that I’ve managed not to kill out on the back porch so that they’d get some direct sunlight after weeks of sitting on the dining table.

The poinsettia absolutely loved being in the sun for the day. The basil plant, on the other hand, did the oddest thing: it damn near turned over so that it could get out of the sun. I double checked several reference books and they all claim that basil loves full sun. But the plant, which had earlier been perky and standing upright, had in the space of just a few hours nearly started trying to grown straight down between the boards of the deck.

And today, it was raining lightly, so I sat the plants out again and the poinsettia once again flourished … and once again, the basil plant managed to project the herb equivalent of a dejected, wet dog.

See for yourself:

The whole thing started to remind me of when I was a child and my father would drag me outside kicking and screaming to play catch on a sunny day in the summertime. I invariably did poorly at my father’s attempts to introduce me to sports, since I am a sedentary creature.

And then it suddenly occurred to me this afternoon: am I doing the same thing to my poor basil plant? Am I repressing his true nature? Am I a horrible parent? Is there a plant equivalent of PFLAG? And if I use its leaves to make pesto sauce, am I committing a hate crime?

Then there’s the possibility that I might be over thinking this … Nah.

Tags: gardening