House Plants Are All in the Family
Blogger and Instagram phenom Darryl Cheng offers fresh perspectives on growing house plants with confidence.
T
he first tagline I used for my House Plant Journal blog was: “A journal for my house plants”. Although it was completely redundant, I wanted to emphasize that I would be documenting my experiences with my own house plants—I enjoyed watching them grow and change. Naturally, when I started out, I looked to books and the Internet for guidance. As I read more and more plant care advice, I found an imbalance where the appreciation of house plants was assumed to be mostly visual, while their maintenance was looked upon as a chore and focused on identifying and solving problems. Hardly anyone talked about the long-term satisfaction of owning house plants. Instead, there was an accumulation of “tips and tricks” that would lead one to believe that plants are either super easy to care for, requiring little consideration of environmental conditions, or finicky drama queens that keel over and die if you don’t mist them every five minutes. Most plant-care advice is given as a set of instructions tied to individual plant species. The advice reads like a baking recipe that advertises guaranteed results. At the same time, a plant’s supposed imperfections are highlighted, and blame is assigned for failure to overcome them: overwatering, underwatering and so forth. The expectation derived from such advice is that a plant should always look the same or even grow to a state of thriving perfection, except when it mysteriously fails to do so. Reading
TORONTOBOTANICALGARDEN.CA
16
FALL 2019
