Sage Gardener

The Sage Gardener had a simple question: What’s the hardiest, hardest-to-kill houseplant you’ve ever had? The answers, as you’ll see, were anything but simple, but first thing first: A majority of respondents insist that for pure can’t-kill-it endurance, nothing beats a snake plant, aka devil’s tongue, good-luck plant or mother-in-law’s tongue. “Thriving, impossibly leggy and ugly,” complains O.Henry columnist Cynthia Adams, who gave hers away “because it just wouldn’t give up the ghost and die.” But they are by no means immortal. My poet and playwright friend from New Jersey sniffs: “My husband killed my snake plant just after we met. I’d had it for about 32 years when we met. Gone.” Along with some precious oxygen in their house. “According to NASA’s Clean Air Study,” a former colleague from Florida pointed out to me, “the snake plant is so effective at producing oxygen that if you were locked in a sealed room with no airflow, you would be able to survive with just six to eight plants in it.” She says NASA recommends 15–18 medium-to-large-size plants for an 1,800-square-foot home for optimum air quality. When you ask O.Henry’s founder, Jim Dodson, about plants, you, of course get a dog story: “We have a beautiful tree fern that has been ravaged by our one-year-old wildling, a Lab-English-spaniel. The tree fern made two comebacks and is now safe in a sunny, remote guest bedroom. Its will to survive is an inspiration.” Another writer, name withheld to protect the guilty, reports “any interesting successes with houseplants involve previous marriages, so I don’t think my mentioning them would play especially well in my household.” A friend from Asheville says she has three peace lilies, which are notoriously temperamental, that are thriving: “one from my grandmother’s funeral in 1995, one from my dad’s funeral in 2016 and one from my mother’s funeral in 2021. I don’t have the heart to get rid of them so I nurse them along.” A former neighbor tells about a peace lily her husband-to-be “clung to as the only living thing he had after moving away from an abusive relationship and to a new town and a new job.” Once they became a couple, the lily survived poor lighting in Michigan, aphids in Georgia, cramped space during grad school: “This peace lily became a barometer for our collective prosperity and . . . literally . . . our peace.” Until “we began the sad trajectory of replicating the marriage my partner had tried to escape. It was a decline for all three of us. Attempts to recover, or even salvage, failed. After almost 20 years, the peace lily died. It took fewer years for the marriage.” On a brighter note, O.Henry’s Maria Johnson says that “probably my longest-lived plant is a next-to-the-house plant, a Boston fern that summers on a metal stand next to the garage.” As spring turns to summer, it bursts into verdant glory, and “its lacy fingers brush the side of my car when I pull into the garage. It reminds me of the way a friend might touch the arm of another while chatting, a gentle way of connecting.” Several respondents voted for ubiquitous and hardy pothos: “It wilts to say, ‘Water me, Seymour!’” says O.Henry’s editor, Cassie Bustamante. But a hiking buddy’s has perhaps the most practical and enduring solution to fading and expiring house plants: “Plastic,” she says.    

— David Claude Bailey