My mom has loved gardening for as long as I can remember.
I would watch her lovingly water the houseplants she kept on the kitchen windowsill of our old house, tip-toeing over the counter. She cared for them like her own children. Bamboos don’t like direct sunlight; orchids are notoriously hard to make bloom again. Yet she made ours bloom a second time.
So when I took home my first houseplant, I was brimming with determination. I was going to take good care of him just like my mom.
My first houseplant was a cactus. I was about 4 or 5 years old. I chose him because he wasn’t like the other red and yellow cacti at Home Depot. He was pink. Like a hot, Doja Cat pink that made your tongue taste like candy whenever you looked at it. He sat on the windowsill next to mom’s other houseplants where he could get lots of sun and be happy. He stayed there a good number of years. But when the time came to remodel our house, we had to move him outside. He weathered too many Washington winters. When I remembered him, I went outside to find a brown, shriveled up cactus. He still had a bit of pink on his top.
Fast forward 15-some years. It’s the summer before freshman year of college. We were at Home Depot, when my eyes drifted towards the cactus section.
“Ma,” I asked. “Is it okay if I get a cactus for our dorm?”
“Sure,” she said. “Make sure to pick a good one.”
I decided on a pink cactus that reminded me of my first one. It sat on our dorm windowsill. I even transferred it into better pot so it could grow bigger than the small Home Depot cup allowed. But I guess we had the window open too often or it was too dusty under the shades, because it started to turn mushy by Winter quarter. I frantically googled “cactus turning mushy” and found the cactus mush was rot. I brought my cactus home the next weekend. After emptying his carcass into the compost bin, I lined up the empty pot as part of our collection.
I was doing homework when I heard my parents come back from grocery shopping.
“Can you get Grace?” I overheard Ma yell. “I have a surprise for her!”
I came to the front door to find her holding a bright yellow cactus. It was sitting in a purple pot.
“I got you a gold and purple one because those are UW colors!” She grinned at me.
Months later, we were getting groceries together at Fred Meyer. I was browsing around while she was inspecting some orchids, when a row of bonsai money trees caught my eye. I gasped: I had always wanted a money tree for our apartment, but all the ones I had seen until then were too large.
“Ma, look! They have tiny money trees! Can we get one? I’m so happy—these are the perfect size— they’ll fit perfectly on my desk!”
She glanced over then returned to inspecting the orchids: “Of course, pick two good ones.”
“Two? Are you sure?”
“Yeah, that way we can have one for the house too.”
The home money tree has kept us company while quarantined. It’s joined our houseplant collection of succulents and orchids under the skylight. Ma’s been busy in the garden lately. She’ll sneak outside between meetings to survey her flowers and come back from shopping with plants or seeds for her vegetable garden. I’ll walk in the office to a vase full of colorful tulips from her latest gardening session.
Right now, my plants are stranded on campus under the care of my best friend. I’m thinking of them this Mother’s Day.