Plippis

An unblossomed bud, after Sister Agnes Plippis (1822-?), late of the Anglican Community of St. Margaret in Grinstead, England. For the majority of Sister Agnes's life, her green thumb was a thing of legend. "Where 'ere she walks," an Anglican broadsheet, The Golden Angle, proclaimed in the Spring of '64, "the earth warms and billows in verdant majesty. Sunflowers shoot enormous, tall and wide from the alighting bounces of her naked soles. As she but fondles a withered, starved shrubbery, blossoms of every variety seem to cascade from the palm of her hand, and the whole of the plant is restored as if by a divine breath to heartiest verdure."

Sister Agnes's faculty for horticulture was so extraordinary that in the winter of 1867 the church set about investigating her for possible canonization. It was around this time that she fell headlong in love with a notoriously impious (and married) landscaper whose company was called "The Haw Haw Gang." (As the most learned of my readers are no doubt aware, a haw haw, or ha ha, is a fence or bank stuck between slopes, or a ditch not seen until approached closely, employed in English gardens to fend off nosy beasts from spoiling tended land.) Abruptly a fallen woman, the church's investigation was dropped, Sister Agnes was exiled from the Community of St. Margaret, and was promptly abandoned by both her lover (who would later suffer a tragic accident, himself, involving a hoe) and her divinely imbued green thumb.

It is no wonder, then, how an unblossomed bud became known to Grinsteaders as a plippis. The real question is why would God be such a taunt and jackal as to give Agnes preternatural gifts and ruin her with one of them: the gift of passion? But, silly me, doesn't He do that kind of thing all the time?

Finally, on the macabre side of the ledger, we have the legend of Agnes's interment--or lack thereof. No one can say precisely when the unfortunate Plippis expired, and therefore what I am about to report is the wildest conjecture, but it is said that Sister Agnes went unburied into eternity, left to rot and melt again into the soil, like any plant removed from the light.