The Private Spring Of Thalassa Cruso

Azaleas too pooped to pop? Fluffy ruffles lost their curl? Pollypoddies look like a tossed salad? Take heart. For every ailment, TV Horticulturist Thalassa Cruso has a remedy: "A highhanded plunge into a bathtub full of sudsy water will do wonders for your plant." If not, well, "then throw it out. You'll feel much happier replacing it with a fresher, sprightlier plant."

There is nothing highhanded about Thalassa, a 59-year-old British-born grandmother who finds "relief from the everyday pressures of life by working among living things which refuse to be hurried." On her twice-weekly show, Making Things Grow, which is carried on five educational stations in New England, she is to spathiphyllum cannae-folium what TV Chef Julia Child is to pate en croute.

Fatshedera in a Mini. Thalassa's pitch is like a cactus--plain yet prickly. Holding up a wire-looped hanging pot, she sniffs: "I consider this pot a bore." Banging down a tray of bulbs on her worktable, she declares: "Now this is a rather ratty object, a relative of the onion called tritelia. It's really not worth the trouble of growing, but some people do, so I have to show it to you." She talks about cow dung as if it were French perfume, condemns tinfoil wrapping as "a crime against a blooming plant."

More often, though, mucking about in a little jungle of flora, she is like a den mother tending some mischievous tykes. "Oh, look at this one!" she exclaims, brushing aside the stalks of a daffodil "with its ears back like a startled cat." Turning to plants suffering from "the sickly miseries," she describes an ivy plant that has dropped its lower leaves as "a miniskirted fatshedera." Then, pausing beside a bed of bursting tulips, she sighs: "Bulbs can bring a private spring."

Remarkably, through a combination of moxie and Marx Brothers, she makes the most mundane chores seem like an adventure in the bush country. When a straggling vine snags her hair net, she accuses it of assault. "A rampaging hanging plant chasing you around is no good," she says sternly, and starts clipping away with her shears. This leads into a lesson on containing aggressive philodendron: wrap the dangling stems around the base of the plant, puncture the skin and pin the stems down with hairpins so they will sprout anew. Her method for watering hanging plants without dribbling on the floor: drop a couple of ice cubes into the pot.

Though the Plant Lady, as her fans call her, went on the air only seven months ago, she is already pulling 500 letters a week filled with questions as well as the remains of stricken leaves, buds and twigs. She doesn't mind picking through the "deb-ree"; as an archaeologist trained at the London School of Economics, she has been digging around in the ground for one purpose or another most of her adult life. The wife of Hugh Mencken, curator of European archaeology at Harvard's Peabody Museum, she lives in a rambling clapboard house in suburban Boston, which is happily "overwhelmed" with hundreds of plants that she is readying for TV.

Her biggest problem, she says, is teaching Americans to create a cool place for plants in their "frightfully overheated houses." Yet, she adds, "if your green things are thriving, don't listen to me. There is no right way to do anything."

At best, her way is always unpredictable. On one show, when a guest expert on bonsai objected to Thalassa's shears, she snipped right back: "Aren't you being a bit fussy?" Then, casting a rueful glance at the guest's shears, she added: "That thing looks like something out of a medieval torture chamber." Another time, while administering to a Star of Bethlehem, she suddenly cried: "Oh, good Lord! Signs of slugs!" Rummaging through the soil like a Roto-Rooter, she exclaimed, "Aha! There's the little brute!" and flipped it onto a table. As the camera zoomed in for a closeup, she advised squeamish viewers to avert their eyes. Then she went into a mighty windup and bashed the creepy crawler with a flowerpot.

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