Yeah, got it. Pick the plant, buy the plant, transplant the plant, nurture, and enjoy a thriving plant. Easy stuff all that.
What about kill the plant?
How about: “Finally, once and for all, kill the plant I’ve had for over ten years that’s a cutting from back home and used to flower so beautifully on the fire escape in the old apartment before my ex and I broke up and is still in that darn pot we hauled all the way from Chicago to New York one freezing winter in her screaming yellow ’73 Super Beetle that had no heater, along with the veritable jungle from her dorm room at grad school and …” Oh my! One sure can get attached to the ideas behind a plant and its history, as much as the plant itself. That makes it all the harder to say a permanent good-bye.
To the task at hand. Who will dig into the grisly details of finally deciding to do one in? You know—that innocent and storied but now useless plant that won’t thrive and also won’t get it over with and just die on its own. How do I accomplish pre-meditated, well-planned plant euthanasia, cover my tracks, do it with style, and still sleep at night?
I mean, do I put it out on the sidewalk and give it a “live if you can” chance? Could some passerby show more mercy than I could? Do I mulch it, flush it, burn it? Or do I cut it into waste-can-size bits and put it out with the trash, dismembered and smothered in its own stale soil?
At the local bookstore, there are hundreds of glossy, upbeat guides about buying houseplants, selecting hearty specimens, methods of propagation, fertilizing, transplanting, and every other aspect of indoor gardening. The plants in these books (and in our fantasies) are pictured possessing an almost supernatural vitality, their proud owners hovering nearby aglow with pure satisfaction.
Sure, some of these guides also have one dark, brief chapter that includes a well-known litany of “Thou Shalt Nots.” They tsk-tsk about overwatering, and over-fertilizing, and then they cite the other cardinal sins known to most indoor gardeners. As a small act of mercy, the offending owners are somehow never in the frame when some poor root-bound, too-pruned, pest-infested runt of a plant is pictured suffering the ravages of tired soil and poor drainage. Then presto— it’s on to more happy success stories.
