Growing conditions - #210

Assessing my roots.

With over 80 plants in the house in near constant bloom and growth, everyone says we’ve got the green touch. But over and over we have to insist: it’s the house. It’s the valley. It’s the altitude. It’s the southern exposure. It’s the 300 days of sunshine. It’s something about this place. It is never just the takecarers, but the conditions they caretake in.

When we bought our home, we inherited several large flora. A 25-year-old monstera, several 100-lb aloes, a hoya carnosa woven into the fireplace. The former caretaker left one instruction: water once a week. So we did. We watered on Sundays, fertilized in spring, pruned what yellowed, rarely re-potted. The plants grew anyway. New leaves unfurled, vines reached, cacti plumped. The house made us look more attentive than we were.

And maybe if we were different people or if we’d flipped the house, that would have been the end of it. Water once a week, keep ‘em alive, let me be more house dressing than dependent. But we are the custodial type, and even in the chorus of green, we started to have a feel for who was singing and who was merely mouthing along.

A lot of houseplants do fine in mediocre conditions. Give them good enough light and good enough water and they’ll produce a few new leaves. Life carries on. But as Ben and I fell under the spell of the easy plants, we started collecting harder ones. The tradescantia nanouk with its constantly crackling leaves. The spindly hibiscus that refused to bush out. The corn plant in its never-yellowing, never-growing silence. Alive, yeah. But is that it?

When we think about what makes a plant grow, we think of soil, light, water. If you’re really in it, you think about drainage, humidity, fertilizer, pot size, the hours of direct sun through a particular window. Every plant needs the same things. None of them need it in the same proportion. A cactus and a monstera both want water, but not on the same schedule. Both want light, but not at the same strength. Too much of what saves one will rot another.

For much of my life, I couldn’t understand the people around me. Roommates perfectly at ease in the apartments where I was going out of my mind. Friends who were happy in cities I couldn’t last a year in. Youth granted me some ignorance: it seemed plausible that either I wanted too much or they wanted so little. So “want” became the framework. The question of home became a question of desire. Where did I want to be? What kind of life did I want? And what did I believe a new address, for the umpteenth time, could solve?

I have lived in at least fifteen places. Childhood homes, college apartments, island staff housing, D.C. rowhouses, New York walk-ups, borrowed rooms, rooms I loved, rooms I’d rather forget. In most of them I produced a few new leaves. I made friends, did good work, fed myself, paid rent. And in most of them, eventually, I yellowed.

I am not a plant that holds a steady green. When the conditions are wrong, I am difficult. I am a vine in need of something to wrap myself around. In the wrong conditions, I can’t reach anything. In the right ones, I grow like ivy.

I want to know why some of them made me more alive and others made me harder to reach.

In the wild, once a Monstera deliciosa hits maturity, it flowers continuously throughout the year. The monstera deliciosa that looms some 20 feet wide over our kitchen is 30 years old and has never flowered. Every year we get new leaves, new roots, new shade over the hall. It has never flowered. But you seemed so happy? But you’re doing so well?

For fifteen addresses I couldn’t read the conditions I was living in. I knew only that I wasn’t rooting, and I blamed myself, or the city, or the job, or the people asleep beside me. I can read those conditions now. So this summer I’m going back, one Sunday at a time, to every place that grew me or failed to—to find out what was actually in the soil.

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Thanks for sticking around while I recovered

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