My Buddy The House Plant #5: Who Likes Life? Who Wants More Of It?

I am moving out my apartment. I am moving into my own place. It has taken me 30 years to figure out that I don’t want to live with roommates anymore, so on Oct 25th, I’m packing all of my things into boxes and walking down one flight of stairs into the apartment directly below my current one. I am literally moving 20 feet. Arguably not a big move. Here’s the only problem, I will not have a dining room. I will have a dining room but not the one I have right now, which I use as a living room because my real living room is actually my bedroom, and that moved the living room into what was the dining room, which moved the dining room into half of the kitchen, which was then filled with houseplants, along with the dining room, the living room, and my bedroom, which is the new arboretum and which also maintains living proof that the chaos theory will not get laundry folded. The kitchen / dining room of my current place has east facing windows, the living room has a huge south facing window, and my bedroom has west facing windows. I do not have blinds on any of these windows because they are filled with plants. There are plants everywhere, dammit. Everywhere.





Even Ikus prefers to sleep in the soil of the Croton plant I put in his cage.


My new apartment is about the size of my current bedroom / living room / chaos theory chamber. There are two other rooms in the new place, but one is the kitchen and one is a strange entryway-cubical which will soon become my shoe / bike / bass / fish / snake storage room. This new place does not have nearly the same amount window space, so my plants will not survive. The cactuses will die shadowy shaded little deaths and the Wandering Jew will quit wandering, give up the lowly life of a houseplant, and become an investment banker or a movie director. The Ficus will fail, the Begonia will be gone-ya, the nepenthes will turn from a pitcher plant to a catcher plant and catch some kind of plant plague, and most of my jade plants will go to the great greenhouse in the sky. That is unless you save these poor, wretched botanical souls.

In short, I am going to give away the lion’s share of my house plants. If you want one, get in touch with me and I will give you a sadistic, maniacal, abusive life form of your very own. There are only a few that I won’t give up, including the 9-foot Aralia, the 5-year-old Jade tree, the 3-stem Dracaenia Tarzana, the Staghorn plaque and the Hawarthia bowl.

What are you waiting for? Come take a tour of my personal green house and take home a part of my life, and destroy it.