How Houseplants Healed My Haunted Mind
I love seeing how popular gardening-especially indoor gardening--is becoming during the pandemic. You don’t realize how much plants can improve a depressing place until you’re forced to be in one for a while. Lots of people don’t think they can keep a single one alive, except maybe a solitary cactus. If you think you can’t do it, realize that I have a plant that needs almost no light and got water maybe three times during the first four months of the lockdown. We are taught, much like we are taught that you can only be good at left-brained or right-brained things, that some people can sustain this kind of life, and some can’t.
Don’t get me wrong. Trying to have a green thumb isn’t everyone’s thing, but even one or two dead plants tend to convince people not to try again, their immediate conclusion that they simply have a black thumb. The self brand of “Black Thumb” often comes without paying close, consistent attention, but they might change their minds if they knew that you didn’t have to have a sunlit porch and big windows to fill your whole space with jaw-droppingly gorgeous greenery.
I got my first plant in Colorado, a small souvenir cactus named Diablo. Taking him with me was like having my own piece of the Garden of the Gods, a huge state park full of magnificent orange rock formations, paths of semidesert, and high, rocky overlooks. When I moved into my summer house, the first place of my own since moving out, he kept me company on the windowsill. He wasn’t my little gray cat, Simon, but he wasn’t an ordinary piece of decor. It would be a year or two after I got him before I would run across more plants at a popup at Third Place and muster the courage--or maybe just the curiosity--to buy a Jade succulent and another I never identified, both of which I killed by overwatering.
Curiosity is another thing that healed me. Learning to note the little magical details of my environment wasn’t easy at first when I was told to look and think about literally everything else, but I was able to recapture the childlike sense of the world being new, to get stoked at the sight of a new and fascinating growth.
It wasn’t until I went to Gatlinburg and stayed at an airbnb surrounded by succulents where the interest truly started to take flight. I commented on the owner’s many echeverias, taking in more and more interesting plants surrounding the farmhouse, the rose-shaped succulents content in their mountain climate, their “petals” a cool green-blue.
The interior of the house was full of hanging baskets, trailing vines, huge pots of aloe, and so many others I couldn’t recognize. I told the owner, a quiet and kind of mysterious old woman with a soft smile, that I wanted plants but my apartment was dim and sad, so she started throwing echeverias and clustering aloes into a metal bucket, and gave me an alligator plant, too, a weed so endearing somebody decided to bring it inside, naming it Mother of Thousands for the way it dropped so many geometric clones of itself off the leaves. She also gave me a single “Ghost” succulent, a pale green plant with a rosette at the top. The Ghost Plant haunted the top shelf of my closet, where it dropped a leaf which eventually sprouted a baby.
I had always loved to write and make art, reveling in many different acts of creation, but this was a different feeling, stabbing through the rage and existential fear that dominated my life. Seeing the tiny, healthy new plant glowing emerald-green next to its mother brought me to tears. I kept my first plants sustained at the top of a closet shelf with a grow light and checking on them every day helped more than I thought it would.
It gave me something else to obsess over besides the job I was afraid to leave, the apartment I couldn’t afford to move out of, and giving the man who lived with me and was afraid to love me long term reasons to stay. I was so full of self-hatred and shame that often moving from moment to moment felt like trying to swim laps during a hurricane. The stale, still air of my apartment had often bothered me, but I could usually tune it out. During times like this it was suffocating, familiarity and a lack of any views of nature compounding my anxiety. There were metal “safety” bars on my kitchen and bedroom window.
For the last couple of years, my anxiety had gotten worse to the point where I often had a hard time breathing. My chest would expand and fall, and I’d feel the oxygen moving into my mouth and out my nose, but it brought no real relief. I spent my waking hours chasing the next fleeting breath that actually felt full. I started avoiding parties because I felt people could see me gasping like a beached fish.
The office was no better. Nowhere was better, but the office compounded this trapped-animal feeling that had begun to rise like bile in my gullet, making me cry or scream in frustration on an increasingly regular basis. I constantly went back and forth with myself on going to therapy, but having my hours cut made that feel unjustifiable in my head.
We sat eight to nine hours a day making constant dials, me trying to reach and hook the executives that would restore my boss’s company to its former glory and trying to convince myself I could subsist on coffee and nicotine.
Every minute of my time was now carefully measured, doled out. My minutes had been stolen from me, then sold back with a steep upcharge.I felt like Ariel from the Little Mermaid, this man had paid for my voice and now wanted me to sing my little heart straight out of my body in exchange for a pair of dumb human legs that would walk me into a worse life than the one I’d left. College had given me a taste of what freedom and individuality was like, and I could feel it slipping away. I was too nervous to eat. I felt weak and dizzy and nauseous almost all the time. This was, everyone told me, the ultimate reality of adult life and I needed to get used to it.
I wasn’t really sure how much longer I could withstand this, so I made my time in the office passable by reading up on every single species that might stay alive in my apartment in between or during daily calls, dreaming about snake plants and peace lillies, golden pothos and philodendron, their foliage filling up the emptiness that had permeated my home for quite some time. If I couldn’t leave, I would at least make where I was better, I decided.
The boss wrote me up, but he didn’t understand doing this was the only thing that kept me here and drumming up what little business he had. Without these tiny sparks of green in my otherwise pleasureless day, I would be useless to him. And being useless would get me fired. And getting fired would have me evicted. And being evicted would mean that absolutely nothing in my life that plagued me as a teenager had gotten any better; college had just educated me more about how messed up it all was.
I finally had something to take care of that would only thank me with it’s existence of beauty and oxygen in return. Keeping houseplants encourages us to seek beauty, to focus on what is around us and to improve where we are in a way that is meaningful, to focus on the shapes and patterns and colors we find most interesting. It wasn’t just having to take care of my plants that was healthy, but being reminded that I, too, was dehydrated and hungry, and important parts of me would shrink if put somewhere that did not suit me, and I too would thrive if afforded the ability to move, or change. I too would be fine if pieces of me were missing. I couldn’t grow back a thumb, but I could rearrange my room, my thoughts, my life.
I escaped my dungeon of a downtown apartment, my 5 year on again-off again relationship that was going absolutely nowhere, and my manipulative capitalist boss laid me off, and that was that. My new home is filled with plants, dogs, and much better people. Being forced by fear and poverty to spend way too much time in places that weren’t happy, something clicked in me. I needed something, something else than everything I’d tried already, because nothing seemed to work anymore.
I took up interior decorating and kept looking for plants to add to my home. My ex would shake his head when I bought new plants after a while, but he knew I wouldn’t stop until every dismal, neglected corner in that dump was adorned with some sort of plant life, shifting up the outside world I could control until my inside world became tolerable enough to stay in.
So, this started as an interest. And this interest became a hobby. And this hobby became an obsession. And now, with a bit of growing and cloning experience, I’ve made it into a business. My goal is to make Boone a plantier place, inside and outside, all year round, to teach people that sometimes it doesn’t even take that much effort, because life does, after all, really want to live regardless of our intervention.
The air in my room feels cleaner. Sometimes I meditate on it, imagining them stripping away small poisons from the air, as I breathe. I think of them dancing when I am not around in undetectable motions, twisting to the patterns of sun patches. I watched a time lapse of a row of houseplants in somebody’s living room suddenly not still like we thought anymore, moving back and forth in slow and silent glee.
“Did you know that houseplants dance?” I told my coworkers the next day. The office tolerated this part of me. Maybe one coworker was curious. My boss told me to get my plants out of his window. It somehow got worse when he moved me back into the room with the girls, even though it was a relief to not have the two men behind me at all times, as daylight savings time began, I would stare at the last golden light of my beautiful mountain day leaking like spilled honey wine down the door to my boss’s office as the quick, harsh, hornet drones of corporate executives droned in my ear, and it felt like dying. It felt like looking into a future where I had already died and I was still sitting here at this desk waiting to see if a stock broker or oil baron or coin investor picked up, heard my pitch, and bought an order of insider training while he tried to imagine the shape of the body he wanted to be next to at the other end of the line. If we were so lonely, I wondered, why did we keep making our lives lonelier?
“Is she hot?” they would ask, and I’d be able to hear them from the next room; their noise was everywhere, all over the world, their discarded dinosaur guts burning and their pointless machines chugging and hand-me-down fortunes spewing filth all over everything that might make me want to keep going.
I killed a money tree one time during a ten minute walk to work. The wind was biting often and hard. I noticed the plant becoming stricken immediately, its leaves turning sickly, mushy, emitting a strange, sour odor I had never smelled before.
I was so desperate to get this plant into the office I hated that I tried to hurry it through an environment it wasn’t built for. It occurred to me that maybe part of me looked forward to seeing my plants more than the man I had waiting at home, and I never bothered to ask him if he could help me get the money tree to work, because I already knew what he would say. I told him that I was working this awful job while also going to school to make the apartment look nice for us, and maybe that was true sometimes, but really I was just doing this until I could figure out how to do something else. I was just trapped in this hole until I dug out. Full of love and intolerable aches that drove me to take trips to lowes on nasty winter days, catching the bus with an armload of tendrils and leaves somehow finding ways to hold me together long enough to get through a time in which I felt trapped in almost every single sense.
These silent beings had been slowly stolen from our everyday lives, their history and usefulness and context hidden, pushed to the background and denormalized to the point where plant-keeping becomes a neurotic or abnormal thing to do. They were whispering oxygen into the air and constantly reminding me that I was alive, not a static object in this room, a thing of use from external forces, but a powerful creature of purpose, descended from survivors, artists, conmen, lovers, fencesitters, soldiers, farmers... people who did things, and people who wanted to, even if they never got the chance.
I wanted a chance. Being able to care for all these things besides myself while deeply depressed became a sort of quiet bragging right. A reminder that clever is what I am. That if they wanted to cut me down, they should have brought a better axe. When I could barely muster the strength to care for myself, it was often the plants coaxing me out of bed, and when I used my time and energy to care for them, I realized there was more than enough left for me.
Now, with quarantines confining us where we didn’t spend as much time in before, all the little details are jumping out as our professional and home lives begin to blur. The neglected walls that still need shelves, the empty corners, the projects left undone, the things that we wanted to do are on standby, so where does that leave us? To our memories and imaginations, and everything we could do inside, or with our own hands.
I am here to tell you that finding whatever that is can help make you better. it’s so easy to do things you thought you could never do, even if it is to just let life continue, whatever that looks like through your eyes. Even if it’s just a tiny new plant growing at the top of a closet shelf, waiting for its chance, or a project you longed to pick up one day, long before the world we knew began to end.
I didn’t want to hurt them at first. I was too tender, sparing them the tears of roots being pulled up as if that would make them better. This taught me that you need more than merely love and appreciation to fully care for another, but it wasn’t the first thing to teach me that. Sometimes you have to dig deep, grab the roots with your bare hands, wincing as you imagine all the time and effort it took for it to get like this, in this particular way, in this one place, but knowing it needs to be another way, and in order to do this, it needs movement and destruction and change.
Plants gave me a sense of permanence despite their fragility and cyclic nature. They could be virtually endless, constantly losing pieces and replacing them. Constantly cheating death with new adaptations. I think of the immortal jellyfish, reducing itself to a polyp again to avoid the end. Starting the clock all over again.
I briefly imagined myself staying in that apartment, because I had made it so nice and added so many beautiful plants that I didn’t want to leave. I imagined graduating and growing a bit older in this town, becoming known as the crazy plant lady above Boone Saloon. I imagined being very alone, but in a way that suggested a sort of companionable silence with myself. I imagined being someone else, someone I could actually begin to like.
I could do that, I thought, just stay up there in my nest and watch the growth patterns of vines and unfolding leaves. What else would I need? The depression was so bad, thinking back on it now they probably saved me. What else would I have had? They gave me a place to put my energy, a sort of magic, a way to get back into life.
Thank you so much for reading! If you want to know more about how to keep houseplants, get information about different species, or use plants to improve your space or business, check me out on Facebook and Instagram:
@highcountryhouseplants
I will regularly highlight the species that have thrived with me and ways to care for and propogate them. I also offer starter sets for low light and high light environments and for people just getting started on their plant journey. I will also come do checkups on your plants if they are having problems.
Additionally, I do interior decorating for business spaces. For a full list of services, check out the next page!
Once again, thank you for reading and don’t hesitate to reach out, I will find the perfect plants for your space! -Adria
