Things are so bad we're talking about house plants.

A story of a Norfolk pine and a reformed plant abuser, sort of.

I asked readers here on SubStack if there’s anything they’d like me to write about and offered “my excellent house plants” as a possibility.

I thought I was joking. Or, more accurately, should be joking.

But things are apparently just bad enough that quite a few people said “Yes! Write about those!”, so here we are.

I have always had a few plants in my house, and I have always been bad at caring for them. Really a survival-of-the-fittest situation. I wasn’t a plant murderer, per se, but more somebody who had to work extremely hard to not murder them. It’s more manslaughter than murder, though. Unplanned, I mean. Circumstantial.

I had a lot of kids, a job, a husband who worked full time in a city 2 hours away, and poor organizational skills. I’ve never been the type of person who should have four children, a job, and a husband who worked full time in a city 2 hours away. Apparently they still let you have children even if you lack the skills necessary to keep plants alive.

I think I did okay in the big areas, if you know what I mean. Our house was chaotic and messy but not filthy. I didn’t read the daily deluge of emails the schools sent about this or that dress up day or activity, but I always threw something together the night before. We pulled it off, barely.

We ate every dinner together, and they were pretty balanced, mostly unprocessed, fresh foods, because I grew up in a family where you ate meat, a starch, and a vegetable every night for dinner, with a big glass of milk. Took me a long time to learn you could actually just eat vegetables, or vegetables and meat. Or, in a pinch, meat and “a starch,” as my mom called it.

We ate highly processed pizza takeout on Fridays, watched movies together on the couch, let our babies sleep in our bed as long as they wanted, whenever they wanted, and all four of our kids still want to hang out with us on holidays.

But I watered the plants when I noticed them wilting.

I’d look over with a baby on my hip or a toddler on my heel and see the awful droop. I’d kick into gear. No option now. Whatever I was doing I’d stop, run to water it and hope it wasn’t too late.

Sometimes it was too late, and I’d throw the plant away with a resigned sigh, reminding myself I am not the type of person to have plants and children or children and plants, and cursing that man I’m married to for never watering the fucking plants. DOES HE LIVE HERE?

Now one of those kids lives in Madrid, and another is 20 and lives here. The third is 15 and I see her more often. The littlest, my “baby,” is 11.

And I have found the plants I had long forgotten. I’ve found them in the wide open spaces of my days, the quiet afternoons when nobody comes home from school because friends and activities, and the man I’m married to is still gone working, but nearby, and for fewer hours. I found my plants in the mornings after the two remaining school-aged children have gotten on their bikes to get themselves to school.

Now my plants surround me and they almost never wilt. I have a monstera that’s massive, but the leaves weren’t splitting, so I learned where to put her to give her more light, and why the branches are so long and leggy, and how to wrap the strange tendrils in a beautiful spiral around the base of the plant, then tuck them into the dirt.

Every day I do a little wander around my plants, pinch the brown leaves off, check the rest for bugs, stick my finger in the soil. I learned how all of my plants seem to love a particular lamp I have, so now, when somebody’s leaves aren’t green enough, or a plant isn’t growing, I announce to whoever’s around, “Well, this one’s going to the plant hospital!” as if they care and I tuck her with the other needy plants on the table with the lamp. Over the coming weeks I watch the lamp doing its magic — the leaves turn a deeper green, new ones form. It is difficult to explain my delight at all that.

I have yet to have a plant the hospital has not healed.

But I did have a plant who didn’t fit.

When I was a girl, my stepfather gave me a baby Norfolk pine. I must have been 9 or 10 years old. We moved approximately three times a year but I brought that little plant with me everywhere, and when I was 14 and moved to northern California from central California, he was somehow still alive. At one point while in high school I lived in a house where I had a little balcony off my room, and I distinctly remember sticking him out there as if he wouldn’t die alone and abandoned on a balcony. Luckily we only lived there a month so I was forced to reengage with him.

When I moved in with my Dad at age 17, I brought that Norfolk pine with me because at that point it was simply what I did. I packed the pine and I brought the pine.

By then she was a few sticks and really, really seemed dead. I definitely thought it was dead. My Dad, though, said let me have that plant, and I guess he had a plant hospital too because that pine grew. And it grew. Eventually we named him Norfy. My Dad and stepmother turned him into a giant, soaring thing that refused to calm down under any circumstances, until they had to move him to their office a decade or so later, where my family printed the town’s newspaper and the ceilings were higher.

Just a few years ago I saw where Norfy lives now, after the “shop” is long sold and my grandmother dead and my father, too, but Norfy, clearly not. He lives in the atrium of a home of a friend of theirs, like a wild, forest tree, as beautiful as any you’ve ever seen.

Later, I thought about the way I showed up at my Dad’s with an almost dead pot of wiry sticks, carried with me through a childhood with too little of my Dad, walked into that house of an almost stranger, and he turned my sticks into sprawling green, the most beautiful scent carrying through the room.

Maybe like him and me, I used to think. He seemed to be caring for me, is what I’m saying. Kept it alive against all odds. Made it beautiful when I could not.

I have a special feeling toward Norfolk pines, is the other thing I’m saying.

So a year ago, I figured it was a sign from God when I walked into my neighborhood florist shop and there was a Norfolk pine. Had never seen one there before and have not seen once since. It was a bit expensive, €40, but of course I brought her home with excitement and not a small amount of nostalgic emotion, and the whole family knew what it represented, and offered the oohs and aaahs I am not even remotely ashamed to receive. This is who I am now. Get excited about my plants or pretend you are.

I put her in just the right spot, having read many hours about just the right spot.

She did very well. I watched that baby bright green push out from the darker branches and I felt alive and mature like a real plant owner.

Then I decided to repot her. I thought she would like it better. She did not like it better. Norfolk pines hate that. They want small pots with good drainage; they do not want big pots with good drainage. I did not read anything on that. I just trusted my murderous instincts.

Almost immediately she started dropping needles. The brown spread from the bottom, up, and up, while I watched and googled and panicked. I moved her near the plant hospital lamp, but I read they hate being moved. I feared there was too much cold draft from the window, and not enough humidity. But she needed the light! So I bought a lamp just for her and a humidifier and got the best, custom made soil just for Norfolk pines. I put her in a spot in my room that seemed to provide what I read they like best. I spritzed her. Every day I examined her.

No matter what I did, her needles browned. Whole branches died and I cut them off, not too many at once to avoid shocking the plant. I worked for weeks to save her. I read everything, tried it all, and waited for just one thing to help her.

In the end, she died completely. I let her go.

There’s nothing metaphorical to say here and the story ends without drama. It was a dead plant. She went into the garden waste. I put so much meaning into that pine, though, felt my Dad’s memory through her, a thousand Saturday mornings waking up to the smell of frying bacon and the sound of live Grateful Dead as my Dad cooked and my stepmother, Neena, walked around dusting and watering the plants and singing along to her old bootleg tapes.

And Norfy, tall and soaring, in the middle of it all, this thrown together family where bare branches turn green.

I thought I would have a pine, just like my dad and me, but I killed it.

So I got another one, because sometimes that’s the only thing to do. Just fix the damn problem with money. I tried, hard. I failed. Try again. I put her in the same special spot in my room with the humidifier and lamp. I have not changed her pot and probably never will no matter what they say or how many years pass although I am absolutely sure that’s also not correct.

Norfolk pines like it cozy, humid, warm and consistent. I can give her that, having learned my lesson, and now I watch the green burst from her crown and think maybe I’ll be just the person she needs if I have no more good ideas.

I doubt I’ll ever have a life again where watering once a week is unfathomably difficult, and the days stream by in frenetic chaos, pots overturned by a racing child and paint dumped into another one, just because. Plants earning my attention only when they’ve lost all will to live.

I think perhaps I’ll have a lot of years to wander around and look at each plant, notice when one needs a bit of extra care, and face that sometimes, we aren’t quite enough, or they simply must go. All we can do is remember what they taught us.

Or the way they once grew.

Norfy in 2023. At my Dad’s memorial service that year, I got to see a picture of that 40-year-old pine.