Would you take this plant?

Silence Dogood here. If everybody knows you love houseplants, people tend to give you houseplants. Specifically, they tend to give you their houseplants. Their houseplants that happen not to be doing so well anymore.

This has happened to me twice in the past week. “I wonder if you would like this plant.” “This plant doesn’t look so good, but I thought maybe you could bring it back to life.” “I’ve never been any good with plants.” “I forgot to water this and it died, but I think it’s really still alive.” And so the litany goes on and on.

In fact, I do love houseplants. Hawk’s Haven, the cottage home our friend Ben and I share in the precise middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, boasts a large collection of begonias, Christmas cacti, and African violets. But, as a fellow plant enthusiast would observe, those are the only kinds of houseplants we keep inside. Now, in our greenhouse, and on the deck during the season, we have a widely varied assortment of cacti and succulents, orchids, amaryllis, cannas, ferns, herbs, pelargoniums, coleus, tropical and frost-tender fruits, a terrarium, plectranthi and tender salvias, and etc.etc. And yes, we are thrilled to receive interesting plants and try them out in both locations, or in whichever one is most appropriate for their culture.

But herein lies our problem. Many houseplants are either not interesting, or too interesting. They’re boring green foliage plants without a single feature of interest, making us wonder why on earth anyone ever decided to bring them indoors to begin with, or they’re wildly, insanely, garishly patterned and colored tropical foliage plants that look like they’ve (barely) survived the paintball wars. And naturally, it’s exactly these plants that people are always offering us.

Last week, I was hit with two large plants of the “boring dark green foliage unrelieved by a single feature of interest” category. I’m really good about speaking up if I inspect a plant like this and see the least sign of disease or pest infestation: “I’m sorry, this plant has —-. You’d better throw it out.” But these plants were perfectly healthy. Neglected, yes, but holding on just fine even so. They fell in the “I don’t want this anymore” category. There they sat, each in the balance of its owner’s lack of interest, poised between me and the trash.

So, okay, I caved. I actually had the perfect place for one of them—a marvelous big, low black iron plant stand I’d had a blacksmith make me years ago. This stand had stood empty since the cats destroyed our Norfolk Island pine—an extremely large, healthy, attractive one, sob—and ever since, I’d been hoping to find another that could take its place. But I’ve never found another one in all this time that wasn’t pest-ridden (scale, mealybugs, gack), and so the stand sat empty. Boring green plant #1 is now occupying that stand beneath a taller stand with a magnificent begonia in our home office. I’m hoping the foliage contrast will at least provide some interest, and as I told OFB, “Hey, at least it will add more oxygen to the room.” But I’m still looking for the perfect, pest-free Norfolk Island pine.

What of boring green plant #2? It’s resting comfortably in the greenhouse. I’m hoping that its large, glossy green foliage might somehow be worked into a grouping of pots on the deck, perhaps with a chartreuse coleus and a red-striped canna. That’s what I tell myself, anyway, and what I tell OFB when he glares at me for taking up precious greenhouse space with such an undistinguished specimen.

Meanwhile, I wish that just once, somebody would offer us, say, a pot of jewel orchids or phalaenopsis or white-flowered rhipsalidopsis or a cinnamon tree or vanilla orchid or maybe a yellow-flowered clivia. “Gee, I’m so bored with this, I can’t imagine why I bought it. Wouldn’t you like it?” Yes, oh yes we would. We really, really would.

So, fellow gardeners, fellow houseplant fanatics, what would you have done in my place? Please vote for options a through f:

a) Tell them to take their ugly plant and stick it where the sun don’t shine.

b) Tell them you’ll take their abused plant if they’ll take your circa-1980 microwave that still even works. Sometimes.

c) Tell them you’ll be happy to take their plant. Your compost bin could use more roughage, and besides, that big terracotta pot must be worth at least $25.

d) Tell them you’ll take their plant, nurse it back to health, and find it a good home.

e) Thank them for their generosity and tell them that you’d love to take the plant, but you can see it has a serious case of chloroplasmosis and you recently read that it could be transferred to humans. Then ask them if they’ve been feeling well lately and announce that an emergency has come up and you really must leave immediately.

f) Thank them and take the plant.

I’ll be eager to hear what you’d do under similar circumstances. Meanwhile, anybody need a couple of boring green houseplants?

             ‘Til next time,

                         Silence