Ever since I was a little girl, my grandparents selected for me a beautiful bouquet of roses and made sure they arrived on my birthday, February 11th. But the point worth mentioning here is that this year, the bouquet also included these decorative little twigs which I thought for sure were fake.
Prompted by a lingering rumor, I decided to cut the tips of all the stems off before settling my bouquet into its new vase. Some where I had heard that this made flowers last longer. I thought, eh, it’s worth a try and did it.
Little did I know that this would be the exact thing which would enable my decorative branches to quietly grow, hidden beneath temporary beauty.
One day, several weeks after the excitement of my birthday ended, I looked over to the corner where my wilting roses sat and gasped! Green leaves! Where did they come from? Upon closer inspection I found they were growing from those decorative twigs that I had planned to throw out as soon as the last rose died. “AH! THERE’S NO SUN!” I snatched up the vase, tossed out the dead leaves/flowers, and rushed them to the nearest window.
As soon as I could, I called the florist whom had created by bouquet, and began researching how to take care of my new Birch Twigs.
The Adventures of Twiggy and the Birch Gang 