Succulents and Loving Too Hard
After my exploits with Celine the Orchid, I decided I was ready to bring more plant life into my home and so I welcomed Ava and Iris, two sweet succulents. Ava was a Graptoveria Moonglow with pink and purple leaves; and Iris was a Valentine, with an icy blue-green cluster of leaves. Like Orchids, succulents are commonly available plants – you can even buy them at hardware stores – and they are considered difficult to kill. But unlike those pre-packaged labels, I won’t lie to you: succulents are incredibly easy to kill. I don’t say this from a place of guilt in trying to cover up the many plant murders I have accidentally committed –this is me trying to stop you from buying succulents under the pretense that they are easy to care for or even worse, gifting them to people who will undoubtedly kill them in a week.
The most common succulents are the Crassula and the Cacti. Here, I’ll focus on the Crassulas: these guys have pillowy yet sturdy leaves that come in an array of colours and sizes—like the stars of the Moonglow or the round-yet-pointy bulbs of String of Buttons. Succulents have gained popularity because of their fun appearance, playful colours, and affordability. It’s also unfair to clump them all up into one category because there are just so many and they are so different: from the self-propagating Chinese Dunce Cap to the flowering Conophytum Bilobum, they are a collector’s delight.
Succulents have shallow roots, so you can plant them together and pack them tightly into one big happy family; they are also sun worshipers (with a few, rare exceptions) so they prefer a heavy dose of Vitamin D. In fact, if a succulent is not placed in the light, they will slowly begin to move towards it. If that’s not enough, their leaves will begin to point down so as to create more surface area, closer to the stem, to absorb the sunlight. Then, soon after, the plant will begin to grow tall. Imagine, a plant that starts off looking like a flat rose can grow up to five inches long and morph into something that resembles the leaning tower of Pisa. As it looks for sunlight, it stops using its energy to grow new leaves, and focuses on growing upwards, desperately climbing its way to the top. (This has happened to many of my succulents: Ava, Birdie, Juan, Iris, and Moon, rest in peace.)
If you observe this type of behaviour, you should move the plant to a brighter spot. If you are feeling brave, you take a sharp, clean pair of scissors and cut off the top, leaving roughly an inch of the plant from the soil. This allows the part covered by soil to form a little cluster of succulent babies. Essentially the plant creates new life for itself. If you’re extremely ambitious you can then plant the discarded part of the succulent in soil and coax it through watering to grow new roots.
Speaking of watering, it’s the hardest part of caring for a succulent. As we tend to our other plants daily or weekly, we often want to give the same amount of attention to our succulents. But in fact, they are happy to be left alone for a week at a time. The most common mistake you can make with a succulent is to overwater and drown it to death. And it occurs because we’re conditioned to think that we can’t give something too much attention; too much care; and to get to the core of the issue; too much love. With plants, watering becomes a form of love language - we want to give the plant the necessities it requires to grow tall and strong. Sometimes you can literally watch a plant react to water in the moment, soaking it up and gaining strength. Watering is an act that shows that we love our plants and is also how we give love to our plants. Watering, then, is a love language.
When people think about taking care of plants, the first thing they think of, quite often, is watering them. “I can’t have plants because I never know how often to water them”, is the most common refrain I hear from people. I often feel like what these people are actually saying is, “I don’t know how to love a plant/nature.” If we follow that thought through to its natural conclusion, it boils down to “I don’t know how to give love.” Perhaps this sounds outlandish, but as a person who has over-watered/over-loved several plants and relationships to death, I can tell you that perhaps it’s not as outlandish as it first may seem.
A few years ago, I learned about “attachment theory”; a theory about the correlation between emotional bonds in childhood and adulthood. Essentially the theory posits that you can predict someone's ability to bond in adult relationships by examining the emotional bonds formed with their parents/guardian in childhood. To simplify it further: as children we depend on parents to survive, so we learn quickly how dependable and proximal our parents are to us. The theory breaks down the resulting personality traits into four types: secure, anxious, avoidant, anxious-avoidant. You can imagine that so many factors contribute to a person’s overall emotional connection to their parents: Did you have parents that were always home or were expected right on the dot at 5:00 pm? Did you grow up in foster homes? Were your parents attentive or did addiction keep them away? I think of the attachment theory quite often when I meet someone for the first time and I’m getting to know them, romantically. But lately I’ve been thinking about it more and more every time I think about the immigrant children that are detained on the U.S. border, ripped from their parents; or how Indigenous children were taken away from their parents, left completely alone in the hands of colonizing strangers.
(I’m going to give you a second here to let this perspective sink in and perhaps carry it with you as we continue to fight for justice and equality for BIPOC and Indigenous people.)
I am going to make an assumption, purely based on my self-learnings, that someone with an anxious attachment style will overwater their plants. Loving anxiously looks a lot like checking in often by texting or calling, ensuring that your loved ones are nearby, getting restless when you haven’t heard from someone or received their attention when you are in the same room, just to name a few examples. I think I spent most of my teens and early twenties living in this realm. It was exhausting. Of course your attachment style can either be amplified or calmed by your partner’s attachment style. That being said, if you’re dating an avoidant narcissist, you’re shit out of luck no matter how self-aware you may be.
Succulents are great at retaining water, in fact this is why their leaves are so plump. Just like cacti, these creatures can retain and store water in their bodies for a prolonged time. So if you are continuously making it rain on them, showering them with love, they’re going to get overwhelmed. And because they can’t run or screen your calls, they will shrivel up and die.
Now, some of you may be thinking: there’s no such thing as loving too much or too hard. But, I will politely disagree with you. Anxiety, jealousy, nervousness, the desire to control—are not love, we should never describe relationships with these characteristics as “passionate”. That is a dangerous game, and it confuses a lot of people who should be on their way out the door. There is no ownership in love. Love is selfless, it is freeing, it is uplifting.
And so, when we are anxiously monitoring the soil of our beloved succulent for any hint of dryness, standing over it with a watering can, we are in definite danger of giving it too much, too soon…and therefore hindering its ability to thrive.
The lesson has to be for us, as well as the succulents: Let it breathe, let it be. Allow a good amount of sunlight in and be a bit ruthless when shedding unwanted dead weight.
My rule of thumb now is to ignore three inklings to water your succulent before you actually water it. This theory is built on my restless tendencies, for you it may be twice or ten times (no judgement)…experiment while being mindful of what is moving you: is it really the desire to nurture or is it the fear of potential loss? Are you watering for the plant, or for yourself?
Instead of coming at it with a watering can, come at it with a few nice words.
And then rest, and breathe, and know that you are a balanced love giver.
Reflection Prompts
You can ponder these questions in your head or take out a piece of paper and make notes, write paragraphs, or call a friend. Whatever works for you.
Where does anxiety or avoidance come up in your life?
Remember three ways you’ve recently shown someone or something that you care about them. Write them down; how did you do this?
Set a timer for one minute, sit down and close your eyes, bring about an image of yourself – at any age – create the feeling of love and continue to feel it.
Words of Kindness
Pick whichever kindness phrase speaks to you, or all three, or use them to write your own.
I am a loving person.
I give and receive love equally.
I love freely.