🪴 HOW TO & TIPS
The plant you should probably bin
Right. I want to talk about the plant you're avoiding eye contact with.
You know the one. It came into the house looking magnificent. Somewhere around month four it started going backwards, and it has been going backwards ever since. Three leaves left. One of those is yellow. You keep meaning to sort it out.
Some new research suggests you should probably just get rid of it.
I'll explain, because the study this comes from has been doing the rounds and almost everyone is reporting the boring half of it.
What the research actually found
Researchers at the University of Reading, working with the RHS, showed people a range of houseplants and asked them to rate how beautiful, relaxing and uplifting they found each one.
The predictable finding is that people liked healthy plants. Lush, dense foliage, soft rounded shapes, obvious signs of new growth. Fine. Nobody needed a university for that.
Here's the part that's more useful.
The wellbeing effect had nothing to do with air purification. The researchers were clear that a single houseplant does very little for indoor air quality, and that the psychological effect is far stronger than the physical one.
Long-time readers will recognise this. I wrote about the air-purifying myth a few months back, and how it all traces back to a NASA study about sealed spacecraft that got hijacked by marketers. Nice to have researchers arriving at the same place from the other direction. Your plants are not cleaning your air. They are doing something else, and that something else turns out to be worth more.
And the effect runs both ways. This is the bit I haven't seen anyone lead with. Plants that looked unhealthy, wilting, sparse, visibly declining, didn't just score badly themselves. They made people rate the whole room worse.
So a dying plant is not a neutral thing sitting in the corner waiting for you to get round to it. It's actively working against you.
The bit that'll annoy the collectors
Here's where it gets uncomfortable for people like us.
Participants weren't responding to rarity. They weren't responding to price, or variegation, or how hard the plant is to source. They were responding to signs of health. Dense canopy, good colour, visible growth.
Which means the golden pothos you paid a tenner for, sitting there thriving with no effort from anyone, is doing more for you than the variegated something-or-other you queued online for and have been nursing through a slow decline ever since.
I say this as someone with a genuine soft spot for the rare stuff. I've imported plants. I've paid silly money. I'm not telling you to stop.
But I've had a suspicion for a while that a lot of us have quietly stopped keeping plants and started collecting them instead, and those are different hobbies with different rewards. This research is a decent argument for keeping a smaller number of plants properly alive rather than a larger number technically alive.
The most valuable plant in your house is the healthiest one. Not the most expensive one.
The three-question test
So what do you actually do with the sad one in the corner?
Ask yourself three things.
1. Do I know what's wrong with it?
If you can name the problem, it's fixable. Root rot, wrong light, spider mites, pot-bound. Name it and act on it. If you've genuinely no idea why it's declining and you've been guessing for six months, that's a different situation.
2. Is anything on it still healthy?
Look for one good node. One firm section of stem. One clean root. If you find it, that plant isn't dead, it's just smaller than you thought. Take the cutting, propagate it, bin the rest without ceremony. You keep the plant, you lose the corpse.
3. Am I keeping this out of hope or out of guilt?
Be honest. Hope is fine, hope comes with a plan. Guilt just keeps a dying thing in your living room to prove you're not the sort of person who gives up.
You're allowed to give up. There is no houseplant court. Nobody is coming to inspect the compost heap.
What I'd actually do this week
Walk round your house and look at your plants the way a stranger would. Not the way you look at them, which involves remembering what they used to be and what you're planning to do about them.
Just: does this look healthy?
Anything that fails, sort it into one of three piles. Fixable, propagate and let go, or straight out. Then actually do it, rather than adding it to the list of things you'll get to.
Your room will feel better. There's apparently research on it now.