I acquired my first houseplant the way most people acquire their first houseplant — by accident, in a mood, at a moment when I had not intended to buy anything. It was a small fern, in a plastic pot, purchased at the grocery checkout for an absurdly low price. I had no idea what kind of fern it was. I had no idea whether it needed sun or shade. I had no idea whether I was the kind of person who could keep a plant alive. I bought it because the line was long and the fern looked soft, and because something in me, that afternoon, wanted to take a living thing home.
The fern lasted eleven months. I am not particularly proud of this statistic, but I am also not particularly ashamed of it. Eleven months is longer than a great many relationships — with apartments, with jobs, with the people we met in the early months of a particular year. The fern taught me a number of things in those eleven months, the most important of which was this: a plant is not a decoration. A plant is a small commitment to the future.
It is easy to forget this when we look at the photographs of the beautiful indoor jungles that populate the design magazines. Those jungles look inevitable. They look effortless, as if the plants had simply arrived, one day, and arranged themselves in a pleasing composition by the window. The reality, of course, is that someone has been watering those plants, and repotting them, and turning them toward the light, and pruning them, and moving them away from the radiator in winter, and putting them back near the radiator in summer, for years. A room full of thriving plants is the visible evidence of a long, patient relationship between a person and a small forest of roommates who do not speak.
The Quiet Daily Practice
There is a particular pleasure in watering a plant. It is, I think, the simplest form of care that exists inside a home. You do not have to interpret. You do not have to anticipate. You do not have to second-guess whether your gesture will be received the way you intended. You pour water into soil. The plant drinks, or does not. The transaction is over in a minute. The plant does not need you to be witty, or charming, or emotionally available. It needs you to remember, approximately once every seven days, that it is alive.
I have come to think that this is what makes plants such a particular gift to a household. They offer a daily practice that does not require an audience. There is no equivalent, in most modern lives, of a thing you must do every week, gently, that no one will see you doing, that has no measurable productivity attached to it, that is purely about the maintenance of a relationship with another living creature. Most of what we do, in any given week, is in some way instrumental — for our work, for our family, for some eventual payoff. Watering a plant is not instrumental. The plant does not produce anything useful. It does not solve a problem. It simply exists, and continues to exist, because on Tuesday you remembered to fill the watering can.
This is, I want to argue, one of the more honest forms of mindfulness available to us. It is not meditation. It is not breathwork. It is not a journal or a mantra. It is the practice of remembering that something is alive, and that being alive requires small acts of attention, and that those small acts of attention are not beneath you. The plant does not care whether you have meditated this morning. It cares whether the soil is dry.
I find, on the weeks when I am most depleted — when the news has been bad, when the work has been hard, when I have not been sleeping well — that the plants are the things I am most grateful to have in the apartment. Not because they cheer me up. They do not cheer me up. A monstera is not a cheerful object. But they remind me, in their quiet, leafy way, that the apartment is a place where things are alive. And that being alive, in this room, is something I am partly responsible for.
Plants as Witnesses
There is a strange thing that happens when you live with plants for a long time, and it is that you begin to feel that they are watching you. Not in any sentient sense — they are not, as far as we know, judging you — but in the way that a piece of furniture that has been in the same spot for thirty years has, in some sense, watched your life. The plant has been there for the argument you had on the kitchen floor. The plant has been there for the morning you cried into your coffee. The plant has been there for the night you came home at three in the morning, slightly drunk, and sat on the sofa staring at the ceiling.
The plant has not commented. But it has been there. And there is something oddly steadying about that. The plant does not ask you to perform. It does not ask you to explain. It does not ask you to be a better version of yourself. It asks only to be watered, occasionally, and to be left near a window, and to be allowed, in its own slow time, to do what plants do.
I think about this often when I read articles about the supposed psychological benefits of houseplants. The articles are usually framed in terms of what the plants do for us — they purify the air, they reduce stress, they improve focus. These are measurable claims, and they may even be true. But they miss what I think is the more interesting part. The plants do not do anything for us. The plants are simply there, and we adjust to their presence, and in adjusting to their presence we adjust to the larger fact of being in a room with something that is not us.
This is, for many of us, a more radical proposition than it sounds. We live in apartments full of objects that we have made, or that other humans have made. Almost nothing in our daily environment is, in any meaningful sense, alive. The plants break the pattern. The plants introduce, into a room full of dead materials, a small, persistent counter-argument. The plants are doing their own thing. The plants are not waiting for us to come home. The plants are simply continuing, leaf by leaf, to be plants.
The Slow Failure, The Slow Return
There is no shame in killing a houseplant. I say this as someone who has done it many times. There is no shame, and there is also no getting around it. A dead plant is, in the end, the visible evidence of an absence of attention. The plant needed something — water, light, less water, more light, a different soil, a smaller pot, a bigger pot — and the attention was not there. The plant, with the patience of all living things, asked in the only language it had, and the request was not answered, and the plant quietly stopped being a plant.
I find this less tragic than I used to. Death is, after all, what plants do. It is what all of us do. The interesting question is not whether the plant survived, but what you did next. Did you put the empty pot in the closet and feel vaguely guilty about it for two years? Did you go to the plant store and buy another plant, hoping to replace the relationship without examining why it ended? Or did you notice what had gone wrong, and adjust, and try again?
I have a friend who keeps a small graveyard of pots on her fire escape. Empty, dry, slightly dusty. She does not throw them away. She does not replant them. She just leaves them there, in a row, as a kind of memento mori for her horticultural misadventures. When I asked her about it, she said that the pots reminded her that the plants had been alive, and that she had been responsible for them, and that the responsibility had, for whatever reason, lapsed. The pots remind her to try again. They are not morbid. They are, in their own way, hopeful.
The plants that do survive, in our apartments, become something different from the plants we bought. They become the plants we have kept alive. They carry, in their leaves, the accumulated evidence of every week we remembered them. They are larger than they were. They are, in many cases, in different pots than the ones they came in. They have been pruned, and repotted, and moved across rooms, and divided, and shared with friends. They are not, anymore, the plants we bought. They are the plants we have grown into the people we have become.
This is the strange gift that plants offer the household. They are slow. They are patient. They do not demand that we be any particular kind of person. They demand only that we keep showing up, week after week, season after season, with the watering can. And if we do, one day we look up and realize that the room has changed — that the room is greener, that the air is different, that there is a small, persistent life in our apartment that was not there a year ago — and that we are, in some small way, responsible for it.
That is what a plant does to a room. It turns the room into a place where something, other than us, is being kept alive.