I began keeping a botanical journal in January of last year. I had two plants. I was, by any measure, not a plant person.
I bought a soft-cover notebook and wrote the date at the top of a page. Below, I wrote: "Monstera. Two leaves opened this week. The older lower leaf is yellowing at the stem."
That was all.
Fifty-two entries later
I kept it up, mostly on Sundays, mostly with a cup of tea. After a year, the notebook had become a surprisingly faithful record of our apartment. The light moved across the pages in a way I had never noticed, shifting by ten or fifteen degrees with each season. The humidity cycled with the weather. The Monstera, yellowing in January, is now thriving in April — because I moved it, because I started misting in February, because I repotted it in March.
What I learned, in one sentence
The plants in an apartment are the apartment.
Before, I thought of the living room as a place I filled with things. After a year of journaling, I think of it as a room whose light and air is already doing work, and the plants are just the part I can see.
