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How Taking Care of Houseplants Taught Me to Take Care of Myself
My first houseplants were a kindergarten of gawky, fidgety succulents I kept in a series of improvised cups and mugs in my windowsills. They were remarkably independent; they needed only infrequent watering and were forgiving of the neglect that I, at 23, imposed on nearly every routine: washing my sheets, taking the pill, drinking water.
At the time I was living in Chicago, struggling to make rent, estranged from my family and working multiple part-time jobs. After graduating in the wake of the Great Recession, the notion that I might attain a career that was creatively and personally fulfilling seemed delusional. This kind of livelihood had eluded my parents, blue-collar Christians who traveled a worn path between church and work and home. I wanted anything else, whatever it was.
The mornings when I took care of my plants became the most manicured aspect of my life. I spritzed, watered and pruned them; I murmured encouragement to unfurling new leaves. I owned a large echeveria that occasionally bloomed a party of bell-shaped flowers, a phenomenon I boasted about as if I had thrust the stem and petals from my own flesh. One morning I discovered a severed leaf atop the soil in the echeveria’s pot. The leaf was still plump and healthy. Then I noticed two tendrils emerging from the shorn end: roots. The leaf had managed to survive, with only the proximity of soil and partial sunlight. I transferred it to its own small pot, which I placed on the sill next to its parent. It was flushed in light all day.
My first attempt at propagation may have been unintentional, but I quickly caught on to its alchemy. Propagation begins with separating a segment, called a pup or a cutting, from a healthy plant, the mother. Depending on its species, the pup needs exposure to water or air to generate roots; this can take a couple of days or longer than a month. Once there is significant root growth, it can be planted in new soil, and will most likely survive independently.
That I was able to take better care of my plants than myself was not lost on me. I couldn’t afford much, but I justified my frequent trips to the nursery as an indulgence I deserved, the therapy I could afford more than an actual therapist.
I tried to propagate everything. I clipped vines from my pothos and coiled them in cups of water. I placed cuttings from my prickly pear cactus in a saucer sprinkled with soil. I used the mismatched silver flatware I inherited from my grandmother to support branches and sprouts I hoped would root in soup bowls and jam jars. My experiments often looked like the refuse of an earnest farm-to-table restaurant; just as often, they failed. When my propagations were successful, I gave the plants away to friends. This was more intimate than I expected. Giving someone part of something you kept alive conveys an explicit trust in their capacity for thoughtfulness and tenderness: It says, I admire the way you live, the care you take to survive your own life.
If caring for my plants suggested I was attentive to the needs of other living things, propagation taught me about the ongoingness of that responsibility. When you care for something for a long time, you develop a nuanced understanding of its unique demands. You even begin to anticipate these needs — which months of the year to fertilize your philodendron, when to check in with a friend you haven’t heard from in a while. Propagation presses even further forward; it understands the potential of another living thing to transcend survival, to thrive elsewhere.
In spring 2017, as I was preparing to move from Chicago to Brooklyn to begin a new job, my best friend gave me an enormous monstera deliciosa that was nearly five feet tall and just as wide. I placed the monstera on a stool in my new apartment; anyone who sat on the sofa got a faceful of the farthest-reaching leaves, and the monstera got less light than it needed.
My first few months in New York were difficult. I was disinterested in my new job. I dated a man who yelled at me in bars, in his car and on the street in front of my apartment. I subsisted on bran cereal and plain yogurt. In the meantime, many of the monstera’s most spectacular, famously lacy leaves, some of which were larger than dinner plates, had yellowed and dropped. I discarded them shamefully. When I sat on the sofa and noticed the monstera’s leaves were no longer intruding, I was devastated. What was I doing to us?
A fellow plant enthusiast suggested propagating some of the remaining healthy shoots, effectively reducing the plant to better fit within its growing conditions. Almost immediately my monstera stopped dropping leaves. It regained its characteristic stance, as if it might just climb out of the pot.
I’m spending most of this spring indoors, so far, and I’m watching my plants more closely than usual. As they’re shaking out of their winter dormancy, they’re having awkward growth spurts and craning in strange angles toward the windows. Most of us fixate so fully on improvement and its manifestations — a spread of new leaves, a bud ready to birth itself into being — that starting over seems like its opposite. It’s inelegant and uncomfortable. It requires admitting some degree of failure, and there are no assurances it will work out. There’s only bearing down on what you know about yourself, and acknowledging that even you don’t know entirely what you’re capable of.
Naomi Huffman is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.
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