The Dark Side of the Houseplant Boom
It started, as so many of life’s journeys do, at IKEA. We went one day a few years ago to get bookshelves. We left with some Hemnes and a leafy impulse buy: a giant Dracaena fragrans. A couple of months later, delighted that we had managed to keep it alive, we brought in a spritely little ponytail palm. And then an ivy. A visiting friend brought us a gorgeous snake plant. I bought a Monstera online because it was cheap and I was curious. It arrived in perfect condition, in a big box with several warning labels: perishable: live plants.
Where is the line between “Oh, they have some plants” and “Whoa, they are plant people”? I’m not quite sure, but I am sure that we long ago crossed it. I would read the periodic news articles about Millennials and their houseplants and feel the soft shame of being seen. But I cherished our little garden. Potted plants have a quiet poetry to them, a whirl of wildness and constraint; they make the planet personal. I loved caring for ours. I loved noticing, over time, the way they stretched and flattened and curled and changed. I still do.
This year, though, as I’ve spent time a bit like a plant myself—rooted in one place, tilting toward windows—I began to wonder whether the plants had been changing me, too. Maybe tending to them, in a time of helpless loss, has been a way of making sense of grief. And maybe, too, as daily life sends ever more reminders that Earth will betray humans as readily as we have betrayed it, nurturing the seedlings has helped to assuage some of the guilt. Outside, fires raged and seas rose and viruses attacked. Inside, not knowing what else to do, I kept watering all the plants.
“F Genesis says. “Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move upon and rather than pigs and cows, and live in homes made of rather than trees. Even the word , for all its implied wildness, takes the shape of human will. “Nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man,” Aristotle announced, and centuries’ worth of humans, including many of today’s, have embraced that ancient hubris.
