Not long ago I found myself in

conversation with a group of people about

the effect of living with houseplants. They

were proselytising the health benefits and

comparing Instagram shots on their

phones, where everyone aspired to the

same sparse white living room decorated

with pops of green. I confessed however,

that I couldn’t keep a houseplant alive – I

couldn’t keep a houseplant alive to save

my life, I think I said – and that despite my

desire to do otherwise, this is one thing

that I routinely fail at. I say to my husband,

‘Look, it is dying,’ and he says, ‘That’s

because it just needs water.’ Even though I

know this, even though he has told me, I

still do not water it. Instead, some small

voice in me insists that the plant has it in

itself to survive a little longer. My husband

takes pity on the limp leaves, he worries

about them, and waters the plant with care

from a special can with a long narrow

spout that allows him to direct the water

with great precision, at the very base of

the plant where the pale stem descends

into the pot of soil. I am grateful that he

does this because I cannot, because the

thoughts I direct to the plant are the same

thoughts I direct to myself, which are the

thoughts, I realise, that my mother

directed to me: You don’t need to eat yet,

You can’t possibly still be thirsty, How can

you be tired already? Surely you can do

better than that. Both my husband and I

humanise our houseplants, we

anthropomorphise them, and because of

this I look at the living plant and think it

should make its livingness go a little

further, stretch it out, test it, live harder

on less, strive to be upright, and each time

I do this I feel myself dehumanised, little

by little more. I would like not to be this

kind of person, this person who refuses to

give water when water is so clearly needed.

But it runs in the family, this failure to

keep houseplants alive. My mother cannot

do it either, and now I wonder how her

mother spoke to her, which might have

been the same but could have been

different or perhaps it was just split

somehow because I remember my

grandmother tending a patio of brilliantly

flowering impatiens, red and orange and

hot pink, and on her coffee table there was

always a vase of deeply perfumed roses

that she had grown herself. Perhaps she

told her daughter, my mother, to hurry on

now and not bother her and sort her

livingness out on her own because she had

houseplants to water.