The Problem of Living with Houseplants
Once, I tried to grow Jacarandas in my living room. This was in the dark days of the Covid pandemic when, locked down in Vienna, I missed travelling to Southern Africa. I hadn’t been especially interested in plants or botany, but by growing the blue-flowering, sweet-smelling trees – alien to central Europe – I searched to have at least a part of hot, sunny Africa with me. Not unlike the homesick Queen Amytis, who tried to recreate her native Media in the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon, I devotedly tended to forty-two Jacaranda saplings that had sprouted from a single pod imported from Zimbabwe.
The living room of my inner-city apartment soon turned into a nursery, heated and humidified, bathed in the pink light of grow lamps. Spread out on the chevron hard wood floor, a legion of terracotta pots served as cribs for the baby trees that within weeks grew into a miniature fairy rain forest. The Jackies, as I called them, never looked like the large, twisted trees that lined the streets in Southern Africa, but like tropical ferns. Also, they never flowered, but their sweet scent indeed filled the air. I gingerly ran my hand along the pinnate branches, and laid the tiny, diaphanous leaves in my palm to study the miraculous pattern of veins. They were like the hands of a newborn.
By the end of the pandemic, all forty-two ferns had reached considerable heights, thanks to my generous use of grow lights. They first outgrew their terracotta pots, then my living room. It was obvious that I couldn’t plant them outside and expose them to harsh central European weather, even though climate change has pushed up the mercury considerably. The clayey soil and the dark boreal winters wouldn’t support trees that liked to grow in Savannah sand so much closer to the sun. Plus, I didn’t have a garden anyway. So I gifted the forty-two ferns to forty-two distant friends, who, I suspect, didn’t look after them with equal dedication. May they rest in peace, my Jackies. Empty nested at last, I boarded the next flight to Johannesburg.
Surprisingly, my short-lived Jacaranda stint was not the end but the beginning of my career as an indoor gardener. When, upon my return from Africa my living room at once felt bleak and bare and I again longed for some green, I decided to go with something more traditional, more Viennese: I got myself one of these decorative big-leaved plants I knew so well from every doctor’s waiting room of my childhood. Monstera deliciosa-plants, or Swiss Cheese plants as they were called, were all the rage and much easier to care for than Jacarandas. When my Monstera prospered, not yet a monster, but promising, I got her an Alocasia and a Philodendron as sisters, then added a couple of Anthuriums, and some more Alocasias and Philodendrons, plus some Marantas and Calatheas and Aglaonemas and Peperomias and Phlebodiums and you name it – if you can. I had never even heard of neither the plants nor their names until then. Now I can tell you all their names, but not their number. I long lost count.
I confess, I am addicted to houseplants. But I am not the only one. Indoor jungles are, so I learn on social media, a worldwide craze. It’s surely not the worst of all addictions when compared to alcohol, nicotine, or gambling. Its benefits have been extensively described, from air-purification to psychological wellbeing. The carbon footprint of industrialized cultivation of tropical plants in colder climates—most houseplants for the European market are grown in cool Netherlands—especially the heating of hothouses and peat exploitation is dwarfed by that of long-distance tourism, large-scale meat-production, fast fashion, and soft drinks in 300ml-plastic bottles. Or is this only what the plant industry tells us? For botany means business – and always has. The growing of exotic plants has troublesome historical and social implications. It might not be the innocuous, wholesome expression of biophilia and philanthropy it is believed to be.
What’s worse than keeping a houseplant? Killing it. Although the lack of a green thumb is generally not considered a crime – on the contrary. The meanness of capricious house plants that die out of revenge for having been watered the wrong day or the wrong way has long become a meme on social media. “This plant really should have tried harder,” Instagram comforts us. Or: “I couldn’t keep a houseplant alive to save my life,” as the Australian poet Stephanie Bishop claims. In her poem “On the Psychological Effect of Living with Houseplants,” Bishop suspects her mother being the reason for her inability to care for her house plants:
…I remember my
grandmother tending a patio of brilliantly
flowering impatiens, red and orange and
hot pink, and on her coffee table there was
always a vase of deeply perfumed roses
that she had grown herself. Perhaps she
told her daughter, my mother, to hurry on
now and not bother her and sort her
livingness out on her own because she had
houseplants to water.
It has never occurred to me that my selfless devotion to my plants is a form of social escapism. Could it be that in the midst of the messy business of repotting a bulky monstera or scanning the leaves of an Alocasia for pests, I really only indulge in the absence of fellow humans? Are we indoor gardeners just a bunch of misanthropic odd-balls and loners?
The first widespread house plant craze took place in mid-19th century Europe, when industrialization and mechanisation led to major social transformation and urbanisation. Cities were sprawling, crowded with poverty-stricken working class, while a rising middle class searched to flee from the sooty chaos, from the engine noise and smells. Entrenched in their carpeted apartments, they valued the privacy and homeliness behind velvet-curtained windows.
Nature was re-introduced in the form of walled, orderly parks, that often featured gas-heated orangeries and palmeries; and into the private homes in the form of still paintings – la nature morte were en vogue. It was a new kind of nature – tamed, or dead, and beautiful.
When new heating-technologies made the keeping of tropical plants affordable to the middle class, cacti, succulents, and orchids from over the sea colonies became all the rage. Grown on windowsills or in little indoor hot houses, they kindled the imagination of the Bourgeoisie, and, together with the travel accounts of explorers like David Livingstone or James Cook, a longing for these far-away places.
The German Romantics had a word for this feeling, aptly coined by the garden-designer, traveller, and writer Hermann von Prückler-Preußen: Fernweh —literally far-sickness, the opposite of homesickness— described the longing for a distant place one hasn’t ever been to – an imaginary paradise. Is this why tropical plants can entice us so much more than the domestic dandelion whose features are, should one care to study it, just as fantastical? Exotic plants on the windowsill are an oxymoron, a paradox, making us long for our homes and the far away at the same time, combining a sense of safety and homecoming, yet, as aliens to our humdrum life, of adventure, including erotic adventures. The poem Orchids by the forgotten Victorian poet Theodore Wratislaw is full of sexual allusions:
Orange and purple, shot with white and mauve,
Such in a greenhouse wet with tropic heat
One sees these delicate flowers whose parents throve
In some Pacific island’s hot retreat.
Exotic flowers! How great is my delight
To watch your petals curiously wrought,
To lie among your splendours day and night
Lost in a subtle dream of subtler thought.
In Paris, Charles Baudelaire wrote more explicitly in Les Fleurs du Mal:
When, with both my eyes closed, on a hot autumn night,
I inhale the fragrance of your warm breast
I see happy shores spread out before me,
On which shines a dazzling and monotonous sun;
A lazy isle to which nature has given
Singular trees, savoury fruits,
Men with bodies vigorous and slender,
And women in whose eyes shines a startling candour.
Guided by your fragrance to these charming countries,
I see a port filled with sails and rigging
Still utterly wearied by the waves of the sea,
While the perfume of the green tamarinds,
That permeates the air, and elates my nostrils,
Is mingled in my soul with the sailors’ chanteys.
Fellow poet Paul Verlaine finally spelled it out, comparing the flashy Dahlia, native to Mexico, to a hard-breasted Courtesan in his eponymous poem. To Verlaine, a notable critique of Bourgeois hypocrisies, the greenery on the windowsills was but another curtain concealing the morale corruption inside. In his most famous poem flowers bloom as embroidery on the house slippers of M. Prudhomme, the upright citizen, a potbellied botanist, who didn’t lust for plants at all, but for his daughter.
This lends a funny smell to what the important Belgian grower of exotic plants, Edouard Morren, said in 1866: ‘Plants should be cared for as carefully as the children of the family’ “Les plantes doivent être soignées comme les enfants de la maison.”
Uprooted and transplanted, exotic plants indeed rely on the care and devotion of us nature lovers – but could anything be more unnatural than plants that aren’t self-sufficient? Maybe instead of kindling or expressing our innate love for nature, indoor plants really feed into our further distancing from our natural surroundings. Maybe exotic plants, whom we care for like for our own off-spring, are the reason we are unable to recognize the beauty of the dandelion that sprouts from a crack in the asphalt without our doing. Why aren’t we in awe of the resilience of weeds when we anxiously water and fertilize the fragile preciousness of industrially raised exotic plants from Holland; plants that unlike the unpretentious dandelion we cannot even eat; plants that do nothing for us but demand our attention, and appraisal?
The main difference between a dandelion and a monstera is not provenience, but that exotic plants are manmade. Maybe keeping exotic plants is the opposite of misanthropy but delusional self-aggrandization. In caring for house plants, we get to play God. We create the earth, the rain, the wind, the sun. We are gods with borrowed plumes.
As prestige objects, exotic plants have been around for thousands of years: as trophies, or scalps. The kings of ancient empires—from Mesopotamia to China to Egypt—kept exotic gardens in which they cultivated the fauna and flora of the lands they had conquered. The famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon did exist – albeit not in Babylon but, apparently, a few hundred kilometres to the north, in Ninive. But homesick Queen Amytis had nothing to do with them. Rather, it was the conqueror kings of the Neo-Assyrian empire Sennacharib and Ashurbanipal, (), who used irrigation technologies far ahead of their time to make Ninive the greatest city in the world, like a megalomanic Las Vegas.
The uprooting and transplanting of exotic plants has always been a symbol of conquest and domination. My Alocasias’ leaves –so mesmerizing, velvety, seductively shaped – have grown to the size of a warrior’s shield, their heart shapes pointed like daggers. Rather than being my bounty, they seem to have conquered and enslaved me. It was different in their native South East Asia, where people used them as umbrellas – I wouldn’t dare employ them for such mundane task. But I, too, feel sheltered by my Alocasias: their abundance, their steady growth, their confidence, their steady optimism, their promise of a paradise on Earth.
God promised the believers, men and women, gardens underneath which rivers flow, forever therein to dwell, and goodly dwelling-places in the Gardens of Eden; and greater, God’s good pleasure; that is the mighty triumph, the Qu’ran says in Sura 9.
The word paradise stems from the old Persian word pairidaeza, later Pardis (پردیس)which literally means enclosed garden, from where via the Aramaic paradesa it sneaked into the bible, into the Quoran as Firdaws (فردوس), and via Greek paradeisos into modern times. The dream of a garden of pristine nature, walled and devoid of human agency, a garden beyond good and evil, is as old as the first sedentary civilisations, in the time of the Sumerians who built the first cities 6000 years ago. As soon as nature – soil – became a commodity, hence, the idea that nature must be protected from human was cultivated as well. A notion that lives on in the modern concept of national parks, with all its dire consequences for local, indigenous people whose livelihoods and identities are inseparable from their natural embedding. Contrary to ours.
Already in the first cities there was a back-to-nature movement – or in the Summerian version: back to the state before the flood. And rightly so: Analysis of bones and teeth found in excavations in Mesopotamia showed that in comparison to their nomadic contemporaries, sedentary farmers suffered from inferior nutrition, earlier arthrosis, and shorter life spans. As it seems not the tree of knowledge caused the fall from paradise, but a field of wheat.
The bible says that at the fall all God’s plants were scattered. To collect plants from distant places is a kind of a reconciliation with God: to restore paradise and keep it safe from now on, behind high walls.
One doesn’t burn in hell, but rot. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, hell is a cold and dark prison, where life’s blood turns cold, and Satan is a monster frozen to his waist in lake Cocytus. God shows us his anger/by sending us eternal winter the Italian clergyman Marco Antonio Martinengo wrote in the 16th century, when the little Ice Age held Europe in its frosty grip. In the Netherlands torrential rains and endless freezing winters made the crop fail and people starve, or freeze to death, or drown in floods. An iceberg drifted into the harbour of Rotterdam when in nearby s’ Hertogenbosch, Hieronymos Bosch painted his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. On the left panel, called Garden of Eden, he depicts Adam and Eve naked by the tree of knowledge. It’s a fantastical tree with spiky leaves that grow like hands with numerous long-tipped fingers from gnarly stems. It’s not another one of his signature surreal, hybrid creatures, but a dragon tree, native to the Canary Islands, and, by the way, now listed as endangered. It can be acquired online, though, at a moderate price.
Only a few years before, Columbus had made landfall in the New World and amazing stories reached Europe. In a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Columbus wrote about the Canary Islands that the inhabitants of both sexes…always go naked as they came into the world; and what is now Cuba, he wrote, was:… full of the greatest variety of trees reaching to the stars… looking as green and lovely as they are wont to be in the month of May in Spain. Some of them were in leaf, some in fruit; each flourishing in the condition its nature required…there are also seven or eight kinds of palms, which readily surpass ours in height and beauty as do all the others, herbs, and fruits. There are also wonderful pinewoods, fields, and extensive meadows. No doubt, Columbus had discovered paradise. Maybe collecting tropical plants is like praying: growing evergreens for eternal summer. Growing bliss in green, heart-shaped installments.
The first botanical garden, now a Unesco World Heritage site, was established in Padua in 1545, when the city was under Venetian rule. The garden pursued both religious and scientific ends – not only reflecting God’s creation, but searching for order among the old and new exotic plants, which arrived almost daily and were met enthusiastically, as with bigger ships and farther explorations the world grew: lilacs and cherry laurel, hyacinths, yellow jasmine, narcissus and scarlet lilies, and Turkish tulips, which were later famously grown large scale in the cold, dark Netherlands – of all places.
If at first exotic plants were cultivated in Europe in the spirit of scientific enlightenment and/or religiosity, the end was economic profit nonetheless. Colonializing explorers sailed into the unchartered parts of the world with botanists on board to catalogue, collect, and ship back home unknown specimen to be acclimatized and profitably grown in Europe.
This went the other way as. Indigenous landscapes were irreversibly altered by the introduction of plants, as in the case with Jacarandas. The tree, native to Brazil, was only planted by the English colonizers to make the African Savannah look more inviting and homely to European settlers.
Jospeh Banks, later long-time director of Kew Gardens, who in his youth sailed with James Cook, named his vocation “economic botany.” Studying nature with the clear set goal of profit, which in the imperial age meant colonialization: As the lands were robbed and the people subjugated, indigenous plants were usurped. By their new names, they became symbols of imperialism.
After the French discovered the Puti Tai Nobiu in South America, they named it Bougainvillea after the French admiral; after the Spaniards discovered the Chichipati/acoctili in what is now Mexico, it was named Dahlia after the Swedish botanist Anders Dahl; after Austrian botanist Welwitsch discovered the onyanga in Southern Africa, it became known as Welwetschia; and when Joseph Banks discovered the Harakeke in what is now Australia, he named it Phormium Cookii, in honour of his captain.
The renaming of plants constituted a second, cultural uprooting. Londa Schiebinger, in her book Plants and Empire, compares the new colonial names of plants to slave names, which, too, stripped a person of their roots, their personality, their identity, to treat them as a commodity. In fact, many plants were even named after slave owners.
Even our current scientific naming system is far from the neutral, objective classification it claims to be. The Swedish 18th century botanist Carl de Linneaus, considered the father of scientific botany, had developed a descriptive system that that could classify all the plants on earth, known or yet unknown, according to the characteristics of their reproductive organs. It was an easy-to-use system, catering to amateur botanists. Some argue that it democratized botany and boosted the interest in nature. But by using Latin, the lingua franca of science, to assign the names, Linnaeus, had re-planted the plants within European culture.
Linneaus was a strict Lutheran who took the bible and the Genesis literally, believing in mankind’s obligation to subjugate and exploit the world. He saw himself as Adam, fulfilling God’s plans by naming God’s plants. From his home in Uppsala, Linnaeus sent out his students, whom he called his disciples, to spread his gospel by cataloguing the new plants according to his system, and by bringing home seeds that would make the Scandinavian country Sweden great – self-sufficient and independent – by growing tropical plants. Linneaus was indeed a zealous man, botanically, religiously, and commercially so. Should coconuts come into my hands, he said, it would be as if fried birds of paradise flew into my throat when I opened my mouth.
And so, exotic plants became the catalogued, ahistorical, disposable mass products we can order online like Billy shelves. And like Billy shelves, they are the same around the globe, exotic everywhere, home everywhere.
It is cynical indeed that exotic plants, stemming from the very lands that suffer from their colonial past, from poverty and corruption and war, countries that bear the greatest burden of climate change, still serve as paradisiacal messengers. It is easy and not painful at all to recognise this historical injustice, maybe even indulge in the collective mea culpa that is, like indoor jungles, reserved to the liberal, urban privileged. Maybe I could make up for this by calling my Alocasias cunjevoi from now on, or my Monstera banana-do-brejo. Or I could let go of them as politically incorrect. But then, of course, without its cultural and ecological embedding my Alocasias is no longer a cunjevoi. My keeping or killing my house plants changes nothing about why, again, so many of us need these paradisical messengers, uprooted creatures that lived through so much – and are still in full splendour.
A quarter into the 21st century, we are again confronted with imperialism – now into the unchartered territories of outer space; we are again confronted with new technologies that seem to make us redundant, and threaten to extinguish our livelihoods; we are again confronted with an unbridgeable gap between culture and nature, that has distanced us from our very physicality, our bodies; When life is lived in the ungraspable virtuality of the internet, the presence of plants is as comforting as the myths from before the fall, before the flood: Plants, living plants, off-spring of this little endangered planet Earth, of which I am a citizen, are part of my globalized identity, symbol of a global unity of which I am part, of which I want to be part.
When the majority of Earth’s inhabitants don’t have access to nature, live in city apartments without balconies or gardens; when the view from the window offers but a treeless concrete jungle with tin serpentines winding along smoke filled glass ravines, with not a dandelion in sight, then the daily checking of my Alocasias’ and Monsteras’ soil is a kind of prayer. After all, I can only water them, feed them, keep them warm and humid. And should they stay alive, should they sprout another leave, it’s as if the gods were smiling at me.