When the pandemic hit, a generation of plant parents repotted their fiddle-leaf figs in their childhood bedrooms.
You're Moving Back Home With Your Parents. Your Plants Are Coming Too
Olivia Petzy had been “dancing around the idea” of leaving New York for a while. For 12 years, she and her husband lived in their sunny Queens apartment, with 40 house plants and a rescue dog. That all changed when Petzy moved back into her childhood room—in a 130-year-old Massachusetts house with five adults, three dogs, a single bathroom, and more than two dozen of her favorite plants.
Plant parenthood has long been associated with millennials and now Gen-Z—a cohort that fills its small, sunlit homes with avocado toast and a potted Monstera or two. But plants are more than an aesthetic. Like all living things, a plant is a commitment and one that gets more complicated during a disaster like COVID-19. While #plantsofinstagram—an Instagram hashtag with 8.3 million posts—continues to be updated with vibrant images of overflowing grow rooms, houseplant ownership comes with IRL responsibilities. When the pandemic led throngs of 20- and 30-somethings to move back in with their parents, their plant-parent status became an issue.
“You would have thought that I was packing away precious heirlooms,” says Petzy, who gingerly swaddled ceramic pots in towels and lined them neatly in cardboard boxes. “I just could not bear the thought of leaving them or coming back to an apartment full of dead plants,” she says.
Petzy was able to fit more than half of her plants in the car ride to her parents’ home. Her best friend offered to care for her towering snake plant, succulents, and hardier species that couldn’t fit in the backseat. Categorizing plants by water needs, Petzy says in giving instructions to her friend, she “tried to have a strong subtext of ‘I’m begging you to take care of them’ without demanding too much of her time.”
“We never anticipated that [the pandemic] would be what would push us out of the city,” says Petzy, but her husband has a pre-existing condition that contributed to their decision to leave New York in the spring. “It felt like we were fleeing, and that came with its own set of anxieties.”
Petzy’s parents, brother, sister-in-law, husband, and each couple’s dog took up space in the “very cool, super old house” that was “absolutely not designed for six people,” she says. For the first month of their summer, she and her husband slept in twin-sized bunk beds—he’s 6’4.”
Counters, window sills, and every available corner became a fixture for Petzy’s prized collection, which got her some “good-natured teasing” from family members, she says.
A few months later, having returned to New York, Petzy’s husband packed up their belongings in an SUV—including their massive plant collection—to embark on a cross-country move to Colorado, where Petzy would soon meet him. After the three-day drive, he arrived at their Fort Collins home and Petzy insisted they FaceTime. “He thought it was because I was so desperate to see him, which was partially true, but also I wanted him to show me where he’d place all of the plants in the new apartment so I could give my opinions,” she says.
Whether the move is across state lines or just an hour away, plant parents like Petzy are wary of moving vans. Christina Heerwagen will never forget the nightmare of hiring movers to transport her 12 plants to a new residence. “I cringed as I saw the movers handle my OG fiddle-leaf fig—I saw a stray leaf in the stairwell, another in front of our apartment, and then four more next to the moving truck,” she says, still horrified.
When Heerwagen and her husband decided to move in with their in-laws during the pandemic, she asked him to broach the topic of “making space” for their plant collection. Trekking over an hour from their San Francisco apartment to Santa Cruz, California, she felt comfortable knowing her in-laws were self-identifying “plant people.”
AdvertisementNot every plant grandparent has a green thumb, though. When Taylor Levy’s New York City lease expired, she asked her mom a vital question: “I don’t care about my furniture, but what about my plants?” It wasn’t a hard decision to leave Manhattan for Maryland to be with her parents. Her family was in the process of moving to Delray Beach, Florida, and Levy was happy to tag along for quality time and warmer temperatures on the condition that her seven houseplants join her.
Like watching a baby take its first steps, Levy beams with pride when she spots a new leaf. She started her collection three years ago, gaining popular crowd-pleasers like the Pilea and Philodendron. “Caring for a plant almost gives people a purpose in this time when every day seems the same,” explains Levy.
And while her parents made some rookie plant mistakes early on, like bringing them out into the cold Maryland outdoors for fresh air and sun, the couple has been inspired to start their own herb garden thanks to their daughter’s skills.
“Who’s becoming the plant parent is an interesting dynamic. I’ve seen a lot of parents get really inspired by their kid’s plant parenting,” says Alexi Coffey, co-founder of Steward, an app that uses technology to map out the best spaces for house plants and provides a concierge service to its users.
Coffey and her husband, Brendan, had the idea for Steward when they began to analyze how plant placement and environmental conditions impact plant care. Their New York City-based company has an international pool of users who look to the app for advice on lighting, plant care, styling suggestions, and, yes, moving tips.
Throughout the pandemic, Coffey has seen noticeable spikes of Steward users in areas with COVID-19 surges as well as users planning moves, dressing up their Zoom backgrounds, and “plant mapping,” a way for users to upload photos and map out the prime spots for their plants, in new homes.
“I think when someone unlocks their ability to grow and they realize they could be successful, they just relate to themselves in such a different way,” says Coffey.
Kaylie Mills, a firm believer in the power of plant care, packed her car with her 41 plants for a move from Scottsdale to Surprise, Arizona. She set one ground rule for her parents: Don’t touch the plants.
“They’ve had plants and they’ve killed everything,” she says. “I know they water them sometimes,” she adds. (Mills has since taught her parents to use a moisture meter.)
To Mills, and everyone I spoke to, plants are a form of self-care. “You can tell where my mental state is by how my plants are doing,” she says, “If I’m not taking care of something that I care so much about, maybe I need to check back in with myself.”
The connection between house plants and mental health is a theme on Christopher Griffin’s Instagram. You might know them as the @plantkween, a plant influencer with upwards of 200 houseplants stacked along the shelves and windows of their Brooklyn apartment. An educator at New York University and the instructor of a Skillshare course, “Plants at Home: Uplift Your Spirit and Your Space,” Griffin uses their Instagram as a platform to teach their 281,000+ followers plant tips while showing the importance of representation and joy as a Black, queer, non-binary, femme influencer.
“To be able to create my own little green oasis indoors has been a blessing in so many different ways,” they say. Griffin says they have spent this year documenting how they were dealing with “everything that was happening in the world” through plants, while simultaneously engaging in “healing and creative expression.”
Advertisement“I’ll always joke around with my friend and say that we’re basically houseplants with complex emotions,” they say. “While I’ve been caring for my plants, I’ve been reflecting and trying to be more introspective on how I can better care and listen to my own body and being and also slow down. I have to also remember that my growth takes time, it takes patience, it takes energy, it takes dedication, [and] it takes consistency.”
But sometimes—especially in the middle of a pandemic—“consistency” is not something a plant parent can offer.
Vivien Albrecht, creator of the blog Posh Pennies, made a bold move when she and her husband decided to relocate from Vancouver to a nearby island. She listed her house plants for free on Facebook Marketplace—an experience she likens to giving them up for adoption.
“Out of the 40 or 50 plants that I had in my previous apartment, I decided to keep the ones that had some kind of sentimental value to me,” she says. Her 10-year-old Peace Lily, a Heartleaf Philodendron born from a cutting her father gave her, and a money plant she and her husband keep around for luck—something everyone could use after 2020.
Melanie Ehrenkratz, a freelance writer, left Brooklyn in June for her parents’ Los Angeles home. Friends and family members who “found joy in their own little plant families,” signed up to become temporary guardians of Ehrenkratz’ collection. She even had a friend bike across Brooklyn with Ehrenkratz’ Tradescantia Zebrina nestled tightly in her backpack.
“Every once in a while a friend will text me a photo of my plant thriving, and I’ll respond with a single-tear smiling emoji,” says Ehrenkratz.
For plant moms like Charleeta Latham, who left Texas to care for her mother in Alabama, she’s restarting her collection entirely. “It was imperative that I rebuild my collection because nurturing plants is therapeutic for me,” explains Latham. “My plants serve as beautiful reminders that what you water grows.”
One tip Griffin shares for departing plant parents is traveling with a plant clipping vs. a whole plant. Through propagation, plant owners can turn a small clipping into a new plant. “They’ll just probate them and grow a piece of them in their new space, which I think is a really beautiful thing. It speaks to the magicalness of plants,” they say.
If creative solutions to plant care under lockdown have proven something, it’s that this “trend” will outlive the pandemic. “Plants were happening before COVID hit as well...and they were happening because of wellness culture and because we're questioning this relationship in nature,” says Coffey. “Those questions haven't gone away—I think they've been intensified.”
“In times that are challenging to humanity, we go back to basics,” Coffey says. “Once upon a time, we all grew—we grew for our livelihood, we grew for beauty. Understanding nature and having that skill set was so essential.” Now plant cultivation has become a response to “our highly technical world.”
She predicts greener architectural trends, buildings, and a notable shift to community gardening are on the horizon. “I imagine if anybody feels like I do, we all want to go out and create things together, in person,” she says.
Jillian Goltzman is a freelance journalist covering culture, lifestyle, and technology. You can follow her work on her website and Twitter.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Jillian Goltzman
