My introduction to weird-ass medieval Christian mystics was Julian of Norwich, who was an anchoress, a woman walled up in a room attached to a church who dedicated her life to contemplation, prayer, and writing (in between quasi-psychedelic mystical visions). Someone would bring her meals and tend to her most basic needs, and occasionally she would lean out a window and have conversations with people in her village. But mostly she was just alone with her thoughts.
My first knee-jerk reaction was to be outraged at this arrangement: the punitive lengths the church will go to to make it difficult for women to have a life of the mind!
But then I started thinking. Hmmm, actually, that sounds kind of perfect! A room of one’s own, someone to care for one’s basic needs, and occasional conversations through a portal into the world.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized it is, in many ways, the ideal I have designed for my own life: I have a home, a partner who supports many of my most basic needs (as I do his), and a portal into a world of conversational companions through Divergent Design Studios.
In a flash, Julian’s choice to become an anchoress made so much sense.
The only drawback to her arrangement, as far as I could see, was that she had no access to the natural world. Perhaps she could see some trees from her window … but I can see trees from mine as well, and for me, anyway, it’s just not enough.
My well being depends so much on at least occasionally filling my senses with natural beauty. I am hardly unique—I think there are few of us who don’t benefit from being immersed sometimes in natural beauty—but in the past few years my access to nature has dramatically narrowed. In a previous lifetime, my family and I had epic summers visiting friends and family who lived in the woods of New Hampshire, the mountains of Vermont, the prairies of Iowa, the lakes of Wisconsin and Michigan. After my divorce, my circumstances changed significantly and I found myself trapped in the city most of the summer. I tried to make the best of it in the little patch of garden behind my house, but this past year I’ve been quite ill and as I’ve adjusted to my new normal, I’ve had to scale back a lot in my life. This spring, my plans for the garden just didn't materialize.
I’m still committed to finding affordable and sustainable ways of getting out of the city for at least parts of the the summer—that’s the whole point of our #vanlife project I recently wrote about!
In the meantime, though, I am coming to understand and accept that I really am kind of a hermit. Unless we take to the road full time in a van, it seems likely that, like Julian, I will spend a lot of my life indoors. My daughter calls my home my “urban hermitage” and for the most part that suits me. If what is missing is some natural beauty, then maybe I should bring the outdoors in by taking another stab at houseplants. Right? Surely a home lush with houseplants would in many ways feed this need for green, growing, unfurling things in my life.
The problem, if you haven’t already guessed, is that I’ve never been able to keep houseplants alive. Ever. I grew up in a home full of plants, and my whole adult life I’ve aspired to be a houseplant person. Sometime in my 30’s I threw myself a birthday party and asked for only houseplants as gifts, on the theory that this time it would be different. This time I really would keep them alive.
The pot that this Monstera is in was from another attempt sometime in my 40’s. The pot survived, the Monstera is new:
Recently, in my 50’s, I even managed to kill some spider plants, which you may remember from some old livestreams on The Spiral Lab YouTube channel:
All indications would suggest that my houseplant dreams are a lost cause … and yet, here I am, at it again. And this time I really do think it will be different, lol. What can I say? Hope springs eternal.
Is it really possible for me to keep houseplants alive? Well, it’s early days, and time will tell. But I have a few ideas about why it feels different this time.
It may seem like a small thing, but shifting the way I think of houseplants as mere “decor” to something that is fundamental to my wellbeing has helped me make a different sort of commitment to the time and attention my houseplants need. The way I think about my houseplants has shifted from inanimate objects I can easily forget, to beings that feel real, alive and growing and that really matter.
In the past I’ve dismissed as childish my trait of attributing sentience and emotion to things like plants and trees and even rivers and ponds (not to mention t-shirts and books and knick knacks), but I’ve learned a lot from an IG account called Queer Nature (two neurodivergent, trans mystics name So and Pinar) about extending care and a sense of relationship to a much wider circle, including the nonhuman world. I no longer think it's childish to treat the nonhuman world as having a sort of sentience, or to cultivate meaningful relationships with a wider range of beings than just a handful of humans and my dogs and cats. My houseplants and I are still getting to know each other, but the potential in our relationship has definitely shifted, and this is making it more likely for me to keep them at the forefront of my consciousness.
This time around I started watching a few plant videos on YouTube and I noticed that a lot of plant people use scientific names to discuss their plants. One YouTuber in particular, Summer Rayne Oaks, of the channel Plant One on Me, is a bit of a savant when it comes to knowing the Latin names of plants. Honestly, at first I found this a bit off-putting. It felt a bit like showing off … but more to the point, it seemed like something I could never ever aspire to. I’m terrible at memorization, and all these scientific plant names? It’s all Greek to me (ok, well, literally it’s all Latin, and while I am the mother of someone who really does know Latin, I decidedly do not.) But the more I started learning, the more I realized that knowing the names of plants also means learning about categories of plants and the ways they are related, and where and how they grow in nature. All of that is both intrinsically interesting, and it also offers useful information about their care, from the types of soil they need, to the amount of water and sun.
In the course of researching and learning more about my plants, I’ve also come to realize that for most of my life, I’ve been doing some really basic things all wrong. I always thought I knew how to keep plants alive, but that I killed them anyway because I’m a hopeless loser who is incapable of following through and being consistent. For example, I assumed I knew how to water plants, and even roughly how often. I assumed that the reason my plants always died was entirely due to my negligence in actually remembering to do it. But I’ve since learned that even when I remembered to water my plants, I was probably doing it all wrong! It turns out that plants die just as often, if not more, from being overwatered as from being under-watered.
Who knew?
My cycle in the past was that I would forget to water my plants until they were terribly dry and turning limp and brown, and then I would resolve to do better and over-water them just long enough to rot their roots. Now I understand so much more about how to water my plants, and how it differs for different categories (or genera, plural of genus, which is the first of the two words of a plant’s scientific name) of plants.
I also have a basic understanding of soil and plant fertilizer, as well as what sort of light different categories of plants need. I’m hardly an expert, but it’s not that complicated, and having specific, reliable information about these basics—water, soil, nutrients, sunlight—has equipped me to feel more successful in caring for my plants.1
In the morning now, alongside my toast and coffee and a few minutes with a really good book, watching the morning light stream through my windows onto my plants is bringing me a lot of joy. The shadows they cast across the room fill my eyes with delight. A planter pole my father made me—a replica of the ones that filled my house as a child—displaying the succulents my daughter gave me for Mother’s Day fills my room with happy family associations. And the new leaves unfurling feel like a miracle, especially in the face of another hot summer in the city.
Knowledge may be empowering, but I have found that an inexpensive moisture meter is the true key to watering success. It totally takes the guesswork out of watering plants. You still need to know something about a plant's watering needs, but when you do, a moisture meter will let you know what’s going on below the surface of the soil with no guesswork needed.