Our Growing Jungle

Taking care of a plant can seem like a daunting task at first, but it is undoubtedly one that everyone has tried to achieve at least once in their lives, and often enough, it works out fine. Soon you realise that it isn’t so hard to keep a little potted plant alive and maybe try your luck at maintaining two, or three at a time. But, speaking from experience, this can become a slippery slope into an overgrown home!

I have grown up in a home that was filled to the brim with plants! My mother has always had a green thumb that is always in the garden and insisted on each windowsill holding at least one pot. They made life much more colourful, though I remember the time and effort my mother would put into her care of all these plants, and initially, it deterred me from getting my own plants to care for. I would think ‘why should I go to all that trouble for something that can die so easily?’

I left for university in 2016. On the day I moved into my new accommodation, my mother bought a small Jade plant, two echeverias, and a Pincushion cactus for my room. She told me that they were easy to take care of and hard to kill, instructing me how to look after my little huddle of plants that sat on my window sill overlooking the glamorous student car park. They added the colour I needed to my poorly decorated university flat. And, strangely, these baby succulents were my first sense of independent responsibility. It was the first time something depended on me to survive.

After university, I moved to a small terraced house in London with a boxy concrete garden. Since we had no open ground, my partner, housemates and I bought a little flat-pack greenhouse and started collecting potted plants to fill it. At this point, I had four plants: my three succulents, one cactus and a newly acquired rosemary bush. Our collection really began during our first year of living independently. Along with our succulents and rosemary bushes, we had a potted hibiscus tree my partner had brought from university. We bought a few more succulents and cacti, and a mixed pack of little shrubs during our first tenancy. We even won a pair of tree seedlings from the London Tree Lottery, which we put into two of the most oversized pots I’ve ever seen! Our collection was growing gradually in size and diversity, and we had managed to keep everything alive over the winter!

The days were getting warmer as Spring rolled in; however, the pandemic began to get serious in March. My partner and I decided to spend the first lockdown with my parents in the countryside. The same day, our housemates also decided to return to their families, which left our house in London unattended and our plants with no one to water them—fast forward three months when the country began to open up again.

We return to London in the height of summer to find our plants had turned rather brown; some had lost their leaves entirely and given their last breath long ago. But we managed to salvage the trees, our succulents, and cacti. The shrubbery and rosemary sadly did not survive being locked away in the greenhouse through a heatwave. It was quite upsetting to get rid of the dried-up remains of our once green little friends, and I had become somewhat discouraged to buy more plants in fear I may not be able to keep them alive either! So we took a short break, taking extra care of our survivors and holding back on buying more plants!

It was coming to the end of Summer, and we were moving from the house into a small flat with no garden! This meant that we would have to get rid of more plants! We couldn’t bear thought of throwing them away, but luckily my partner’s parents were happy to take our two lottery trees and their enormous pots back to Yorkshire with them after helping us move. Now we were down to eight plants: the hibiscus, three cacti, two succulent, a rubber plant, and a weeping fig bush. Some may argue that eight is plenty of houseplants! But to us, our room just seemed a little bare. We had a great big window with all this free space and nothing to fill it with. So perhaps it was time to begin building our selection again.

It has really been in the last five months of living in our new flat that we have doubled our assortment of plants! We have spent a great deal of time researching each plant we already have, and prospective plants we would like to add to our collection. We find out whether the plant is toxic to cats since we have a cat that cannot help but nibble any new plant we get unless it is placed in a spot away from her reach. With so many new additions, we took the time to research each one’s individual care regime and create a detailed watering schedule for optimum health!

Still being furloughed from my job, I spent a few months in the flat doing very little and losing myself in self-destructive thoughts. But I found that taking care of our plants had supplied my life with a sense of regime. I knew that at the end of each week, some of our thirstier plants would need watering. As time went on, this unusual sense of responsibility helped improve my productivity as I began planning what I would be doing with my days until I went back to work. Even now, when I find myself without any motivation to do anything, I wander over to the windowsill and admire our plants. Something about seeing how far they have come, and how much further they could grow fills me with pride that lifts my mood. It is as though I find inspiration in the natural beauty of what we’re nurturing so dearly.

Our collection has now grown to include: a Hibiscus tree, a Monstera Deliciosa, a Jade plant, a Parlour Palm, a Pineapple plant, a Rubber plant, a Dracaena Draco, a Dracaena Sanderiana, an Eve’s Needle Cactus, a Snake plant, a Weeping Fig Bush, a String of Hearts, a Blue Star Fern, two Echeverias, a Pincushion cactus, and a Ball cactus. I’m excited to learn more about all the different types of plants to discover and even go as far as propagating some cuttings to grow even more of my favourite species!

Caring for plants is a surprisingly fulfilling hobby that teaches patience and reduces stress. Just being surrounded by natural elements such as houseplants can help the mind recover from mental fatigue if you can’t make it into a picturesque landscape. When I find myself in a moment of calm, I gaze about our room at our growing jungle and am thankful that I fell down the slippery slope of houseplants!

- Atlas