Plant Wizardry
Image by David Clode
One of my nephews is a total plant wizard. I gave him that title last time he visited, when he single-handedly changed the trajectory of several of my house plants’ lives.
While I adore plants, both indoor and outdoor, I’m a rather laissez-faire gardener. I let them do their own thing, watering when needed but otherwise leaving them to their own devices. Prior to that time central Texas turned into Hoth, the bushes in front of my house resembled walls, forming a corridor to my front door. I loved it. Sadly, those hedges didn’t survive the second icemagedon, but that’s a story for another day.
On a recent visit, my nephew spied one of my flowerless orchids and mentioned how one of theirs was about to bloom again. I love orchids, with their gorgeous symmetry and elegant whorls, but I have never been able to get my orchids to flower again after the blooms from my initial purchase have died. So, I asked him about it.
He asked how I watered my orchids and I shared my process of using ice cubes once a week per the instructions that came with the plant. After a brief moment of obvious surprise, my nephew informed me that watering with ice cubes wasn’t in the plant’s best interest. Neither was the cute pot with zero drainage it had been sold to me in. As he carefully did triage on my plant, he explained the necessity of proper nutrition and watering, which, I thought I knew. Apparently, I’d been doing it wrong, though, and the plant had been paying the price.
The news shocked me. I mean, I’d been following the instructions that came with the orchid to the letter. Had it in the right light, watered regularly (with ice cubes), trimmed away the spent flowers, all the things. I’d thought I’d been doing a good thing following the grower’s care instructions, and felt terrible knowing I’d contributed to the plant’s lackluster state when I actually wanted it to thrive.
Being the sweet soul that he is, my nephew gave me a big hug and told me, “It’s okay, Aunt Sarah. You did the best you could. And this plant is doing surprisingly well all things considered.”
He went on to explain that many house plants are sold with incomplete and sometimes incorrect care instructions because when those plants die, people will go out and get new ones. Apparently, the same idea went behind potting plants with varying needs together in the same pot (which I owned a few of). They look pretty upon purchase, but over time, since the plants need different things to thrive, somebody would inevitably end up dying, and the plant owner would go get more plants. It had never occurred to me that big business, with its planned obsolescence, would do that with living things.
As my nephew gleefully repotted my houseplants, giving each individual plant the correct type of soil and pot for its needs, he showed me the right way to care for them. Including how to water correctly, which involved setting the pots into water so the plants could draw in what they needed from their roots, rather than being flooded from the top and having vital nutrients eroded from their potting mix. Who knew? All these years I’d just been dumping water over the tops of my plants, there’d been a better way. A more nurturing way. One in which the plant took what it needed, slowly over time, rather than what it was given in a flood it had no time or capacity to absorb.
Of course, metaphors abound here.
Thankfully, unlike the house plants, who are stuck in their pots at the mercy of a caretaker, we are able to change our own environments and take steps to meet our varying needs. That could look like being more intentional about the types of things we consume, or being more selective about the ways in which receive them. Maybe we allow more space and time to let ideas marinate, or perhaps we give ourselves more time for integration. Or maybe even find a guide to help us navigate new terrain, or gain a better understanding of the current one.
Whatever this looks like for each of us, here’s to finding nurturing ways to give ourselves what we need in support of more than mere survival. Life is not meant to be lived in triage mode. My plants are absolutely thriving since having made simple tweaks to their care. It’s amazing what happens when we get what we need. Here’s to discovering what that is for each of us, and allowing ourselves to receive it.