I have recently witnessed how resilient these plants can be. I decided to try overwintering several of my ornamental peppers this year and ended up neglecting a couple of them as term papers and chemistry homework piled up.

This little black olive was reduced to a stick with a bunch of dead leaves and seemed to be completely lost. I cut off a branch and looked carefully and there appeared to be some green tissue inside, so I completely stripped the plant and watered it well.

The first picture shows what it looked like when I stripped it about two weeks ago. On this scale, it looks like nothing has changed, but a closer look (second photo) shows that this plant is indeed still alive.

Please forgive the crappy photos--it's difficult to get the camera to focus correctly at this scale.

It's pretty awesome to me that a plant seemingly so near death can be revived so easily.