How To Deal With Your Crippling Houseplant Addiction

Houseplant addiction often starts as a harmless folly into the world of living decor but before long you’re meeting strangers to trade cash for a little succulent in the car park of your local Coles. 

How did it get this bad? Why is your living room looking like someone has to roll a 5 or an 8 in Jumanji to rescue you? Why are you developing *feelings* for that well established monstera in your living room? 

Short answer is you’re a bit basic. Long answer is that it starts with a gateway plant. Typically, a friend introduces you to the high octane world of home-horticulture by dazzling you with their display. 

Before you leave and go back to your plantless dwelling they’ll slip you a little cutting. A naughty little number that’s barely the size of your hand. Once you pop him on your windowsill you begin to itch. 

By this stage the plant has got its hooks into your brain. You can’t help to think your living space looks like a soviet shopping centre at the peak of the Russian famine – and so it begins. 

You begin to withdraw from society. A natural consequence of spending half your pay on new plants every week. Not to worry though, they are your friends now (and all the bugs that are squatting in em now). They may have a bit more personality than you but they’ll stick with ya.

A natural stage in every houseplant addicts cycle will be the great slaughter. Hardly surprising though, you’ve managed to make a dog’s breakfast of most things you commit to in life so why should keeping plants alive be any different?

Guilt overcomes you. Your plant-babies only wanted to live but you slowly extinguished their life-flame with your incompetence. You have become a monster(a). A personification of a container of Roundup.

To deal with your glyphosate-al tendencies you buy more and more. Desperately trying to fill that empty void with more precious plant babies. This is when nearly every spare bit of space in your pad is occupied by a plant. 

To feed your addiction you start butchering your plants and selling their cutting-babies to the highest bidder. You can barely look at yourself in the mirror these days, you’ve become a plant-child trafficker. 

Eventually, you’ll risk it all for a variegated Monstera. Your life flame will eventually flicker and die without this horrendously overpriced plant in your living room. It’s just the way it is now.

There is no known cure for houseplant addiction and if you go down the path you’ll be destined to live in a greenhouse for the rest of your life. However by that stage, you’ll be too far gone to care.

For more on house plant addiction: Ms “I Love Houseplants”

Documenting the Human Zoo is thirsty work, so if you enjoyed what you read how about buying Belle a cutting, ay?

$