So today I am at Lowes buying some soil and I decide to peruse the half-dead clearance section. (A salesman politely corrected me... It's the half-alive section.) On the top shelf I see a 1 gallon pot labeled "clematis" with three black vines climbing out the top of it. I pull the pot down and poke my finger near the base to reveal some nice looking roots, so I think, "Why not? I LOVE my kingfishers, and it could just be a nasty case of wilt." I ask the clerk for a price on it and he looks at me like I'm insane and says, "I don't think you want that one, but if you do... twenty five cents?" So now I'm convinced it's gonna be mine. I get to the register and the cashier feels so guilty she only charges me ten cents for it.

Okay, so I get it home and cut off the top growth and destroy it. I then tip the pot and out of this 1 gallon pot falls a 3x3x3 cube of roots. I have never seen a roots grown into such a perfect cube. They were beautiful and there was no rot to be seen, but it was obvious that this once outgrew a smaller pot only to be stuck in a larger one and neglected. I washed off as much of the old potting medium as i could and gently teased the roots out into an 8 inch disc of. I potted it up in new medium and watered.

Now I don't have much experience with this kind of thing, but I figure if those little bags of clemmies they sell as bare root can turn into plants surely this mass of roots can. And if it can't... well, I've spent more than ten cents on many a plant that didn't make it a year.

Does anyone out there have experience with a plant that has fully wilted? This root ball had a crown, no rot, but no visible buds. Is it possible that with a little TLC the roots could push up some new stems?

If this does live, I'm sure I'll be posting pics to help ID it, since the tag was gone.