The Last Word On Nothing

The other day, I had to take everything off a bookshelf I replaced, and I had to move one of my oldest possessions: A beautiful, unkempt houseplant of indeterminate background. It has been on a high shelf most of the time I’ve had it, and even before that. My husband rescued it from the upper kitchen cabinets of a house he shared with several friends in college. It moved across the country with me twice, and, I am embarrassed to say, it’s still in the same pot. It predates my marriage by a few years, and that marriage is by now almost legally adult-aged, so this plant is pretty old, although I actually have no idea how old it is or where it came from.

I think it is a pothos, but it might be a philodendron. I spent a few minutes looking at houseplant websites to try and figure it out, and I can’t be completely sure which one it is. It is green, but sometimes its leaves are variegated golden or white, depending on, well, I don’t know. It might be a function of the plant’s individual genetics, and it might be a function of the water and sunlight it receives, or a function of the last time I spritzed fertilizer into its soil. Or some combination of those factors. I know very little about this plant, actually. This is a weird thing to realize about something you have lived with for almost 20 years. It has heard and seen so many things, and I barely think of it for a few minutes once every 10 days or so.

It is one of about 20 houseplants in my home, scattered throughout the living areas and bedrooms and especially my office. I have exactly one false one, which I got on Wayfair in a moment of weakness, in part because I wanted something tall. But all the rest are real. I find fake plants largely very sad, while real ones are beautiful, living things that add dimension and feeling and company to human spaces. They are living members of the community of this planet, that you can just buy at a store, or even a supermarket. And then they live with you, green and reaching and striving and changing all the time, while asking for nothing but water and light. Is there an easier way to experience the concept of growth? I don’t think so. Some plants even will flower, when you take good enough care of them. Little gifts of evolution, just because you were nice.

My oldest plant is the kind of plant you used to see all the time in an office, back when people had offices they had to go into, or enjoyed going into. At my old newsroom, which no longer exists and whose building has been converted into a library, we used to have a plant lady who came in once a week. I don’t remember her name, but I remember that she had long blonde hair that spilled over the shoulders of her gray hoodie, and that she wielded sharp pruning shears. It was such a luxury to have her, I understand now. What a different time! Newspapers don’t even exist anymore, let alone pay plant caretakers. She came in for about half an hour every week, watered the plants, pruned brown or yellow leaves, checked for mites and gnats, and generally enlivened the entire newsroom by doing so. The plants used to be a couple desks away from me, but I would make it a point to walk past them.

Then one day the plant lady was let go, her services deemed no longer affordable, a couple years before the same thing happened to me. Some of the plants she watered were the same as mine, pothos-maybe-philodendron. They stayed behind after her contract was canceled, and I watered them sometimes. The reporters took turns taking care of them, to maintain the feeling of luxury, until one day the publisher sent them all packing. Followed by us, but I digress.

I had to prune the large pothos-or-philodendron when I moved it off the high bookshelf. One of the cuttings is now in a glass of water in my children’s bathroom, where it is slowly taking root. I will give it to my older daughter when the roots are strong enough, and teach her how to take care of it. The pruned plant is now sitting on a pedestal stand that I bought in high school. I put in a bamboo stake to help it curl higher, rather than spilling its vines all over the floor. I watered it today. I told myself I will try to think of it more often.

The plants don’t ask for much in return. When I was younger, I used to spray my plants with water when it rained, feeling some kind of obligation to give them a taste of the outside world. But they did just fine without that. They are resilient jungle-dwellers and they don’t need me, really. A houseplant might wither without sufficient attention, but it doesn’t need a ton of care to be just fine. When you give them what they need—not too much, just enough—they can even thrive. Houseplants don’t complain about being in the same pot for nearly two decades. They don’t need a lot of change in order to grow. They are happy as long as they face the sun. One can learn a lot from them.

Image: Not my pothos, but a much fuller-looking specimen, from ProFlowers via Flickr