2019 Resolution #1

I want to be a better plant parent.

My problem isn't that my plants die. On the contrary, they're all flourishing. Some of them have gotten really big, and I just... *sweats nervously* ...Nobody prepared me for this and I don't know what to do about it?

That's what she said, I know, but listen. Most larger pots are meant to be placed outdoors, meaning that they have drainage holes that leak directly onto the ground. I live in a fifth-floor apartment with parquet floors, so finding appropriate containers to use to repot my plants is an issue. It's also an issue that I don't have anywhere to store gardening equipment and bags of potting soil.

And when I say that some of my plants "have gotten really big," what I mean is that they're giant fucking monsters. Like, I have three stalks of bamboo that I bought at the Murder Kroger on Ponce de Leon in Atlanta in the summer of 2005 that are now growing horizontally because they are taller than my ceiling. I have a pothos plant that I bought at the Methadone CVS on 40th and Pine in West Philadelphia in December 2011 that has gone on to colonize an entire wall of my living room.

I think I've arrived at a point where I need to talk with an expert. Do such people exist? Like, tree coaches? Green consultants? Houseplant whispers?

How We Turned the Bradford Pear into a Monster

Scientists thought they had created the perfect tree. But it became a nightmare.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/how-we-turned-the-bradford-pear-into-a-monster/2018/09/14/f29c8f68-91b6-11e8-b769-e3fff17f0689_story.html

I sat down with the current arboretum director, Richard T. Olsen, and asked him to explain how Creech could have gotten the Bradford pear so wrong. Olsen says you can’t judge what happened without understanding the historical context. The mission of scientists like Creech and Fairchild was to find and manipulate plants in a way that solved a problem, met an unmet need or simply offered an attractive new plant for the American nursery industry and consumers.

Olsen recites Thomas Jefferson’s line: “The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.”

For Creech and his peers working in the 1950s, the potential environmental effects were not part of the decision-making.
 

A bit later on...

"Without thinking much about it, we have globalized our environment in much the same way we have globalized our economy,” Del Tredici has written. He lives in the Boston suburb of Watertown, where he is seeing the first wave of callery pear invasion, young plants “in highly disturbed habitats where no maintenance has occurred,” he told me.
 

You wouldn't think an article about a pear tree would be a huge world-spanning adventure, but you would be wrong; this story is intense.