Lynda Hallinan
Houseplants fill the empty nest
Ishould have known there would be consequences. Three weeks ago, when my youngest son turned 5 and started school, I should have known I wouldn’t get off scot-free, for severing the daily bond between mother and child is like Newton’s Third of Law of Motion (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction), Edward Lorenz’s butterfly effect, and Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychological transference, all rolled into one.
In 1895, Freud published his musings on transference in Studies on Hysteria. In his psychoanalysis work, he’d noticed how people in counselling for emotional issues sometimes redirected their feelings at their therapist, and sometimes those feelings latched on like biddi-biddi burrs to socks.
While falling for your therapist if seeking help for daddy issues or an unrequited Oedipus Complex is generally ill-advised, transference isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You’re more likely to be nice to the old lady next door if she reminds you of your grandmother than, say, the old bat who took her shoe to you as a 6-yearold, causing you to wet your pants in the corner of the classroom. But I digress.
When my youngest son put on his school uniform for the first time, a small part of me felt guilty for revelling in the possibilities presented by my newfound freedom. But a larger part of me was too busy fist-pumping and whooping loudly as I drove to the local garden centre, where I found myself alone, in the houseplants aisle.
Boom! Any vestiges of maternal separation anxiety were immediately extinguished by a hit of horticultural dopamine, as I stroked the chartreuse fronds of a Boston fern and tucked it into my trolley along with a cascading nephrolepis, two epiphytic rhipsalis, a couple of carnivorous nepenthes and a sacrificial maidenhair.
Miraculously, three weeks later they’re all still alive, although the maidenhair is on suicide watch. I’ve already killed three maidenhair ferns this year and things really aren’t looking good for the fourth. These prima donnas of the plant world hate draughts, dry air, direct sun, heat, cold, overly damp potting mix, mealybugs and mildew. But even at $20 a pop, these fatalistic ferns are still cheaper than a bog-standard bunch of cut flowers and a fraction of the price of those fiddle-leaf figs that millennial hipsters hanker after on Instagram.
Houseplants are having a moment. Quite a long moment. For as long as I’ve been raising kids, indoor plants have been hitting the headlines and going viral on social media. Some of their popularity is due to supply and demand, as wholesale nurseries can’t propagate them as quickly as we can kill them, leading to Trade Me bidding wars.
There’s another theory that, as property prices lock first home buyers out of the market, young couples are choosing nature over nurture.
Says The Telegraph: ‘‘Don’t Mock Millennials for Hoarding Houseplants.’’ The Washington Post: ‘‘Millennials are filling their homes — and the void in their hearts — with houseplants’’. The Independent: ‘‘Millennials are obsessed with houseplants because they can’t afford kids.’’ Let’s look at this objectively. Houseplants don’t talk back, embarrass you in public, refuse to eat their vegetables, pee on the toilet seat, fight with their siblings or squish McDonald’s sweet and sour chicken nugget sauce into the carpet.
If you are busy doing other things and occasionally forget to feed or water them, houseplants don’t whinge. And of course, should you accidentally kill them, you can quietly compost them without any criminal repercussions.
Is it any wonder that, with no one else at home for me to hug during the day, notwithstanding two geriatric cats, a co-dependent dog, 10 chooks and two kunekune pigs whose idea of a friendly tustle is a king-hit to the crotch, I’ve transferred my affections to a pretty collection of exotic plants? It brings me a peculiar pleasure to patrol and pamper them for a few minutes each day, and the feeling seems to be mutual.
‘‘Look!’’ I announced to my husband when the mystery orchid – a zygopetalum, perhaps? – that has sat, ignored and unattended, on my potting shed bench for well over a year suddenly saw fit to send out a splotchy chocolate brown bloom this week.
‘‘Get out of the way of the telly,’’ he replied. ‘‘Telv and Sarah [Married at First Sight] are having a bust-up.’’
He should be grateful for his wife’s new habit. If I wasn’t so busy pottering about with houseplants, I’d be off to the SPCA to adopt a few more cats.