Whew boy! It has been a week! Not in a terrible way but in a "why is everything happening so much???" way? Goodness me.

And now that I've woken up three times this week in order to deal with my plants at five in the morning, and have successfully used up a 55 quarts bag of soil (juuuuuust making it within the year mark!), I must ask you and even myself - why do people love houseplants?

Anne Helen Petersen did a wonderful newsletter herself that dives into the history of the houseplant and why people started to bring them into homes, and she's going to do a follow up sometime this week (I think!), so I won't pretend like I've done any research into this. But as someone who grew up with a mother who had about 80 plants, and now has.... about 80 herself, it truly has been fascinating to watch how the culture has changed about plants in the last 5-10 years. 

I started my plantstagram back in 2018 ish when I had over 30 plants, and as I tried to entrench myself into the community, I realized that with 30 plants, I was far behind everyone else. Most people had a minimum of 75, and the bigger accounts had over 100. To a degree, it made sense. Having plants crowded around makes them look even more lush; having a variety of plants allows you to switch out your groupings for your grid so it doesn't look like the same monstera because the other monstera are dying (cries to self). 

But the plantstagram community faced the same issue that many other Instagram communities find - the desire to want more, more, more. I got to watch this with the beauty community on YouTube, where being the first to have every eye shadow palette was more important than curating your collection, and the bookstagram community... whew! I too love me some books but the joke where there are two hobbies - buying books and reading books really seem to be a thing. It's more important that you have all the important books than you read or enjoy them.

In the plantstagram community, you damn well better have your staples - the monstera plant, the snake plant, and the ZZ plant. But if you have a few of the other more difficult plants, such as calatheas and string of pearls, those are acceptable because you have ~made it. But then you also have to be on top of the popular plants of the moment. At one time, it was a triostar stromanthe, which, friends, was one of the most difficult things I've had to take care of in my life. But to have it meant that I could have better engagement on my channel, which is the point right? Or wait - was it to show off my plants??

Why do we care if we have the right plants? And why do we keep hoarding them?? As Anne Helen Petersen says, "...houseplants, well, they look good on Instagram. But lots of things are cheap and look good on Instagram, and I don’t own 34 of them and constantly yearn for more." An incredibly true sentiment that somehow disappears from my mind when I go to a plant store because they are so pretty!!

Thankfully, it seems as though we are moving slowly away from requiring the plant of the moment to be able to have a thriving channel. A lot of the social media posts are video now (thanks TikTok), and it's hard to just show off your collection in a video, leading to a truly educational rise of help videos, such as:

• Does your plant look like this? Here's how to fix it.
• Dealing with bugs? Use this product.
• Your soil drains badly? Use this mix of soils (some people use sand. SAND?!)

It's as though the plant boom of the late 2010s, of course helped in part by people staying home and wanting to beautify their homes in 2020, has slowly vanished and now people realized they spent quite a bit of money on these plants and they have to keep them alive somehow.

So maybe this is a good thing. Maybe we're finally getting away from the hoarding culture of what is essentially a beautiful brat that doesn't do anything in your home but makes it prettier and working on keeping them prettier. Maybe we're discovering the beauty in a thriving home plant ecosystem that is something you watch grow over time, not just by numbers. And if I'm being honest, I hope so.

Then again, I did just buy two more plants OOPS.

Anyway, onto some links.

• How do you treat yourself after something major happens? I.... conceal don't feel. But I think I might celebrate a win with maybe buying one of these monitor stands? Expensive? Yes. Pretty??? Yes.
   
• I recently discovered Paramore and I really like the song Hard Times. At first it was fun, and then I was like oh this is a mood. But a fun mood? Idk they seem lovely and I'm going to dive into their discography now! Any recommendations?
   
• Hey, remember when I recommended Crash Landing On You ...twice? Well the leads of the show got married. Everyone else, go home. They won cutest couple! I don't make the rules, I just inform the masses. 

Anyway, I hope everyone has a great weekend and mine is more head empty, no thoughts unlike last week!!