If Only I Could Give You The World, My Houseplants

I own a bunch of plants. They are nice to own, and they make me happy, and I like to think they do a little to combat how abysmal I am at decorating because someone might come over and say, “Oh, look at all your plants!” instead of “Wow, what a small kitchen” or “I like how you get around only having one closet via all these strategic heaps.” The trouble with houseplants is that when they have problems, the solution is… everything?

Over the years, my plants have done OK. I’m not too fussy with them, which has mostly worked out. I owned a calathea for a while, a charming plant that folds up at night because it has a bedtime like a person, but the minute the heat went on in my apartment it threw a fit and never recovered. I knelt close to it as it expired like the door scene in Titanic, watching it brown and crisp and be basically too delicate for this world, or at least the aggressive world of New York City radiator heat. A few summers ago I grew food plants on my fire escape, and despite a war with aphids and birds, I got a ton of jalapenos and mint out of the deal. I would have gotten parsley, but a caterpillar ate it, which would have been annoying if it wasn’t so fucking cool.

During my time in DC, my plants took a turn, growing yellow and leggy and miserable. I have a couple theories: their soil was old and needed changing, which I neglected. They went from my north- and east-facing NYC windows to the full blast of my DC south-facing ones, and weren’t suited for all that abundant, inescapable light. The water in DC sucks. They were picking up on my own unhappiness in town, their sad state reflecting my own. When I moved back to New York, I salvaged the good stems of my monstera and pothos to water propagate, and sent the others on ahead in their pots. I carried the cuttings with me on the train alongside my ukulele like I was cosplaying Zooey Deschanel, ready to start a new plant life. 

Of course, some of that new life involved compulsively buying new plants, because I moved back to Brooklyn in the spring, when plants pour out of hardware stores and garden centers and plant sales. I added a tiny parlor palm I fell in love with outside the Korean grocer, and the only modestly-thriving rubber tree in a neglected corner of the hardware store, and a little tangle of pilea glauca from a gardening club sale in a church, where the old man checking me out clucked “You’re just buying one plant?” and an old lady behind me in line said, “Well, he’s young,” a compliment I’ve been repeating to myself every day since. My cuttings grew roots in their jars of water, and things seemed to be looking up.

Over the weekend, I moved all the plants to new soil and pots, sizing up the ones that needed more space and giving them all a refresh. I put the water propagations into dirt to start their new lives as real plants. While I knew my sad yellow plants wouldn’t magically become green again, I hoped the infusion of fresh nutrients would help both me and my plants turn over a new leaf (sorry) back in the city.

But before all this, my new parlor palm’s leaf tips started browning, and it’s stressing me out. This brings me to the crux of this blog: whenever you Google any problem with a plant, the potential causes are, officially, Everything. Why is my parlor palm browning? Too much water, too little water, too much sun, not enough sun, the pot is too small, the pot is too big, it’s too humid in my apartment, it’s not humid enough. Pages and pages of plant advice from self-styled experts feels functionally useless. Is it that plants express all their struggles through the same symptoms? Are all these plant websites just SEO farms, using every possible plant word to rank high in Google? Am I just a dumbass who doesn’t understand plants and can’t take care of them well? If I had to, I’d say I’m a plant guy, but I don’t want to become A Plant Guy. I vacillate between over-attending to them, and deciding that since plants tend to do fine in nature, they can do fine without me and I need to stop worrying so much. (This last one is hard, because I love to worry.)

This morning, after Googling “why parlor palm tips brown” for the thousandth time and rereading the same useless advice, I moved the parlor palm from the bigger pot I’d put it in on Sunday into a smaller pot, after watching a video saying they struggle with too much space. Of course, now I’m worried I’ve moved it around too much and this will stress it out and make its problems worse. And of course it hasn’t magically and immediately let me know it’s happier, because plants move at their own slow pace and that is what is supposed to make them so peaceful and not represent yet another out-of-control variable in my ultimately uncontrollable life. I put it back on its pebble tray, which half of Reddit says is a real hack for humidity and the other half says is bullshit, but I like being the kind of plant owner who uses a pebble tray. 

I wish I could give you everything, plants, in the exact right amounts to make all of you happy. But I am just one man, with just two windows. I will never be the cool people on YouTube with big rooms full of grow lights and plant stands and a primordial jungle of greenery. I will never keep detailed spreadsheets of your needs and care schedules, despite becoming a spreadsheet guy against my will in other aspects of my life. I will do what I can for you and learn to make peace with your mysteries–or I will go buy another parlor palm, and then a really green snake plant instead of my yellowing one that until Sunday had another mysterious plant growing alongside it in the pot because it came that way from the farmer’s market. Maybe I’ll try to solve my plant problems by getting more plants to have problems with, until I reach some kind of problem equilibrium. But if any readers know a plant website that’s actually useful, drop the link in the comments.