Happy Plant

A Beginner's Guide to Cultivating Healthy Plant Care Habits

Puneet Sabharwal, Travis DeMello

• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781648961366
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Gartenbau

Foreword by Morgan Doane and Erin Harding, co-authors of How to Raise a Plant and Make it Love You Back and co-founders of @HouseplantClub.This comprehensive visual guide to houseplant care is packed with illustrations and hand drawings, color photography, accessible infographics, and advice for first-time and experienced plant parents alike. Build confidence in tending indoor plants through this guide to basic plant care, all while learning about the history of houseplants, how they communicate, and sustainable ways to troubleshoot houseplant parenting issues. Whether you're afraid to bring home a plant or have a healthy row of potted green pals on your windowsill, this book will walk you through the trials, errors, and joys of plant care.Perfect for those who are new to gardening or who want to learn more about how plants enrich our lives, this how-to guide from Puneet Sabharwal, cofounder of popular plant subscription company Horti, is a verdant treasure trove of information on how to raise your very own houseplants.

Chapter One: Plants WHERE DO PLANTS COME FROM?

I might have been six or seven years old when I cut into the stem of a rubber plant (Ficus elastica, ‘Ruby’) in the verandah of my childhood home and watched, strangely mesmerized, as the white fluid bled out of the plant. It was common to see my mom clip a leaf or two of tulsi, or holy basil, and boil the leaves in her chai for flavor. The idea that plants are alive never occurred to me until one day, soon after creating a small stab in my favorite victim, I went inside and saw an ad playing on TV about deforestation. In it, an animated plant talks about feeling pain, encouraging people to stop cutting down trees and to plant more seeds for the future. I went outside with tears dripping down my face and apologized many times to the plant before placing a Band-Aid over its wounds. It would take me many years to fully understand how humans develop a relationship of mutual care with nature and that plants are intelligent creatures. The one positive from that experience was that I did learn that they are truly living.

Six-year-old me making a small cut into my mother’s rubber plant to watch the white fluid bleed out of its stem before applying a Band-Aid to the wound.

Have you ever thought about how the language we use to talk about plants parallels how we discuss our own human anatomy and bodily functions? Just look at how the veins of leaves resemble the veins in your own hands. Every one of the 350,000 known plant species experiences the same biological processes as organisms, microbes, and animals like us. Plants represent a wide range of colors, shapes, and sizes and serve as sources of inspiration for human creativity and innovation. Their cell walls provide structure to our material lives in the form of plant fibers spun into clothes; wood used to build structures and burn for energy; and paper on which to compose music, make art, and print books like the one in your hand.

While we still often categorize plants as decorative objects in our homes, the emerging field of plant neurobiology is helping us understand how perceptive plants are to their surroundings. Plant neurobiology is founded on the belief that plants are fundamentally intelligent life-forms that can communicate with each other, navigate their environments, and solve problems.¹ Take single-celled, or unicellular, organisms like algae, for example, which exhibit responses to stimuli and make choices to escape harm or pursue pleasure. If they can possess complex behaviors, then plants, which are composed of billions of such organisms, should, at the very least, have the same potential.

Outside of the realm of conventional science, there are many Indigenous traditions that consider plants as perceptive beings. The Kutia Kondh people of the state of Odisha in India perceive all plants, from canopies of trees to plains of prairie grass, to be social creatures with their own respective communities that communicate and interact with one another.²

Each plant possesses individual characteristics and behaviors that collectively compose green landscapes and underwater forests. Plants are the foundational food producers of Earth’s ecosystems, providing shelter, clean water, and oxygen for neighboring organisms. Notice the way that air courses through your nose when you take a breath, filling your lungs and belly, and gently exiting your mouth. Like you, plants respire, and they thrive on sunlight and water. There are multitudes of genes, hormones, and sexualities that are contained within all plants. They reproduce and reinvent themselves—adapting in uncertainty, protecting themselves in danger, sending help to sickly or injured members of their communities, and flourishing in healthy environments.

1.1 A Short History of Plant Evolution

The world of plants is fascinating, but the information can be a bit murky and is too often explained in clunky, technical terms. When I first began my plant subscription company, Horti, I found it difficult to access practical information about the origins of plants and their inner workings. While writing this guide, I consulted with plant scientist and researcher Christopher Satch to help break down plant history and biology, and to shed light on how houseplants became an important part of our lives.

More than half a billion years ago, the first plants came to land from the sea: algae, in the form of floppy kelp, would wash ashore and tolerate desiccation just long enough for the tides to come in and resuscitate them with life-giving water. But they did not do this alone. The story of how plants evolved to survive on land would not have been possible without help from fungi and bacteria.

There are countless fungi and bacteria, with some bacteria, such as cyanobacteria, specializing in harvesting nutrients by forming a film on rocks near water. The film slowly degrades the rock, allowing the bacteria to gather minerals for use in photosynthesis to feed themselves. (Photosynthesis is a process that cyanobacteria as well as plants experience, albeit in different forms.) Also known as blue-green algae, cyanobacteria are ancient organisms that are the first known to conduct photosynthesis. As a result of scarce minerals to feed upon, or of drying out, bacteria die and are then fed upon by fungi, creating a more powerful acid to dissolve the rock, with live bacteria supplying the sugars in exchange for some of the nutrients. The biofilm kept these kelp-like creatures, or plant ancestors, wet enough to survive until the tide came back in, and eventually, the plantcestor replaced the photosynthetic bacteria by doing the work of providing fungus with sugar—a primitive sugar daddy, if you will.

Early Earth, around five million years ago, is thought to have looked much like modern-day Iceland—covered in mosses and other small primitive plants.

The interdependent and mutually beneficial relationship between ancient plants and fungi became successful enough to intertwine their destinies for the rest of time. Early Earth, once rocky before life appeared, became covered with mosses, liverworts, and other primitive plants that had no vascular systems. While land was covered in moss, these early plants were unable to grow past a certain height, and, for a time, no vegetation existed on Earth that was more than two feet tall. Lichens, ancient composite organisms, are an interesting evolutionary relic from an earlier era that persist to this day, unchanged.

Lichens are a symbiotic association between a fungus and algae, cyanobacteria, or both. The algae photosynthesize to provide sugars and the fungus provides moisture and minerals.

Over time, plants evolved vascular systems, which allowed them to grow taller and live farther from the sea. By this time, over 420 million years ago, enough generations of moss had lived and died to add organic matter made up of carbon compounds to the earth, creating the first soil. Young Earth closely resembled Iceland today, with vast mou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Plants: Where Do Plants Come From?
• Chapter Two: You: Your Nature for Nurture
• Chapter Three: Your First Plant: A Pothos Grows in Jersey City
• Chapter Four: You and Your Plant: The Elements of Plant Care
• A Guide to Common Houseplants
• Planting Journal
• Glossary
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright