Imagine Curtis Evoy’s surprise one morning four years ago when outside his office door, he found a small orphan with an attached note, “Please give me a good home.”

It was a prickly situation. The orphan was a long-thorn cactus, the note stuck through one of its needles.

“Some people form real attachments to a plant, like it’s a pet,” says Evoy, superintendent at Toronto’s Allan Gardens Conservatory, which regularly receives requests to take in a beloved plant — usually over the phone, not abandoned on the doorstep — when the owner can no longer care for it. “Some of the plants are on their last legs, but to the people, they’re beautiful.”

Ideally, a cherished plant will be passed down to a close relative or friend, but sometimes there’s no one. Evoy gets on average a call a month, but more in the fall when plants have gotten too tall or heavy for the owner to keep lugging inside.

Allan Gardens accepts about 90 per cent of them, he says. Unusual specimens are added to the conservatory’s collection and the ordinary ones shoehorned in. If Allan Gardens can’t take it, he might offer it to another conservatory. But please, says Evoy, no more ficus trees.

The most unusual one he adopted is a five-foot-tall baobob tree, grown by a woman from South Africa who had brought the seed with her to Canada.

One woman who was very sick with cancer came in with three prickly pear cacti. “She had a big cry,” recalls Evoy. “She had taken care of them for years.”

About eight inches tall when she dropped them off, they are now three-feet tall and flowering. They found a good home.