I love houseplants. They raise the vibrations in a room, bring nature to the house in cold weather, and move me a little closer toward my lifelong goal of living in a Crate and Barrel catalog. I buy a few every year, inviting them into my home with the promise of sunlight, water, and attention, and then I kill them. Not right away. They live happily with me for a couple of months, long enough for me to earn their trust, and then I kill them.
I don’t mean to kill them, but I always, always do, like 100% of the time I kill them, and I’ve wondered if maybe it’s time to look honestly at the fact that I continue to purchase them knowing full well I will be the last human they ever see. At best, my optimism and lack of self-awareness happens to be deadly, like the abominable snowman crushing Daffy Duck’s ribs with his loving, double-fisted embrace. At worst, I am a plant serial killer, thriving on a trail of botanical death and destruction.
I would prefer that neither of those shoes fit, so this winter I bought a book called How to Houseplant, determined to stop identifying as a person who can make fronds drop off a Boston fern just by looking at it. I read eagerly of southern exposure, repotting, and soil drainage, and I set about tending to the droopy Norfolk Island Pine I’d lured into my clutches so I wouldn’t have to make a centerpiece for Christmas.
Well, now it’s April, and I feel like enough time has passed that I can officially share with you all my big news:
I think I killed that one, too.
And now here’s this pandemic, and like the rest of America, I feel the onset of global pestilence is a nudge from the universe that I ought to learn how to grow my own food. Also, I read Ashfall and I know that if you survive the initial blast, as we appear to have done, you’d better start growing kale or be prepared to be roasted over a fire by roving bands of nihilists. So I bought some seeds, read the instructions on the back of the packages, and now have four egg cartons filled with potting soil and hope basking in the light of our bay window.
They’ve been in there for a couple of weeks and exactly nothing is happening, which I’ve been assured is fine because “it’s not warm enough outside yet,” in spite of the fact that they are in my climate-controlled house, in my bay window, and people grow orchids with this same technology in the middle of winter but that doesn’t apply here. Fine. I accept that I know nothing about plants and other people do, and I also accept that plants do not seem to follow the same basic caretaking rules as cats, dogs, fish, hamsters, or children: feed them + deliver occasional monologues to them + leave them alone = growth.
I’m hoping that because I get to eventually put these new plants outside, the divine intelligence of nature will take over and then I can’t screw anything up too badly. Plants grow by themselves all the time, right? I can look out my window right now and see, like, twenty plants that I haven’t done anything to, and they seem happy enough. Once these babies are in the ground, it’ll be smooth sailing, right? …Right?
If not, the garden shovel I purchased for tending to them should make an excellent weapon against the cannibal nihilists, once we get to that point. OR said nihilists will sense the miasma of plant death lingering above my house and just leave me alone. Either way works, but mostly I’m holding on to my hope that I can get enough basil going to make some pesto this summer.
