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March 5, 2020 1:20 PM

Woman Took Care of Succulent for Two Years, Then Realized It Was Fake
posted by chavenet (51 comments total)

This is the most relatable thing I've seen since "The light inside has broken but I still work."
posted by Foosnark at 1:27 PM on March 5, 2020 [26 favorites]

From what I've seen of succulents that size, the fact that it hadn't died in the first ten days should have been a clue
posted by AzraelBrown at 1:28 PM on March 5, 2020 [15 favorites]

I am deeply saddened to think this could even happen. Your plant didn't feel fake? You never noticed that it never grew? Reacted to light? So. Sad.
posted by tiny frying pan at 1:29 PM on March 5, 2020 [9 favorites]

It's a pity she ever had to find out the truth.
posted by 2N2222 at 1:37 PM on March 5, 2020 [16 favorites]

My wife has had air plants for a couple of years and for the longest time I thought (to myself) they were fakes and some kind of trick played on her and many others. But then one of them started to flower so I had to admit that they were alive. Or at least the one that flowered is.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:40 PM on March 5, 2020 [22 favorites]

As for the fake succulent that started it all, Wilkes said that she's keeping it, too. "I figured I loved it for two years; why quit now?" she said.

She's not angry, she doesn't hate the plant for being fake, she still thinks it is beautiful.

Would that all of us could find such grace inside ourselves.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:44 PM on March 5, 2020 [96 favorites]

I'll bet her boyfriend is a kid standing on the shoulders of another kid in an overcoat.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 1:44 PM on March 5, 2020 [92 favorites]

I could have killed it.
posted by octothorpe at 1:51 PM on March 5, 2020 [60 favorites]

If anyone needed a nuanced illustration of the Southern US's favorite not-quite-insult, definitely not a compliment ...
"Aw, bless her heart."
posted by bartleby at 1:55 PM on March 5, 2020 [6 favorites]

It's a pity she ever had to find out the truth.

It’s best to walk out of Paradise of your own will.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:01 PM on March 5, 2020 [17 favorites]

My coworker watered my office plant at my request for three weeks while I was gone. I came back to find that he had also watered the plastic plant nearby because, as he said, he wasn't sure if it was real or not, and didn't want to accidentally kill it.

He now double-checks which plants are real and which fake when I go on vacation.
posted by telophase at 2:02 PM on March 5, 2020 [24 favorites]

Most of the time, people get those plants and they over water them, so they die from root rot. Second most often, they don't get 6+ hours of very bright light and they grow to become spindly. They aren't difficult to keep alive, but succulents like that need very intense light to stay pretty-looking and compact.

Fun fact: air plants are epiphytes, which is a kind of plant that grows on another plant, most often trees. An epiphyte doesn't steal nutrients from its host, so it's not a parasite. You can see air plants everywhere from central to south Florida, and a lot of times, they even grow in big clumps on power lines. As long as there's available humidity, they live pretty easily. But inside a heated house in the winter? That's lower relative humidity than most deserts.

Having one flower is pretty cool! Your wife knows what she's doing.

(but, yeah... owning a plant for TWO YEARS and seeing no growth at all, and you STILL think it's a real plant? Yikes)
posted by SoberHighland at 2:04 PM on March 5, 2020 [5 favorites]

per-household plant-related spending jumped by $100 to an average of $503

Department of crazy unbelievable facts. The skew on that average must be insane, like Elton John going broke from buying $500k worth of cut flowers insane.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:06 PM on March 5, 2020 [8 favorites]

I mean, based on the last reports we're technically all a little bit plastic now.
posted by Young Kullervo at 2:11 PM on March 5, 2020 [17 favorites]

I once killed a cactus, so, honestly, she’s ahead of the game, far as I’m concerned.
posted by drivingmenuts at 2:12 PM on March 5, 2020 [5 favorites]

per-household plant-related spending jumped by $100 to an average of $503

See what you can accomplish by giving up an unnecessary luxury? (Next headline: Millennials are killing the avocado-toast industry!)
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:12 PM on March 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

I worked for a while at a fancy-pant$ gardening center and greenhouse in Chicago. Some of the things we'd hear! It's amazing just how little some people (and these are people with money I'm talking about here) know about plants!
posted by SoberHighland at 2:15 PM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

I actually saw this headline in my RSS reader and just assumed it was from Reductress.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:26 PM on March 5, 2020 [9 favorites]

It’s so brave to admit not noticing it was plastic. This was the perfect post for me to read before bed. Thank you 0P!
posted by Bella Donna at 2:35 PM on March 5, 2020 [5 favorites]

Feels like a fresh metaphor for my college degree.
posted by Kale Slayer at 2:45 PM on March 5, 2020 [14 favorites]

See what you can accomplish by giving up an unnecessary luxury? (Next headline: Millennials are killing the avocado-toast industry!)

Millennials hacked 'housing' by living under a saguaro cactus they bought from the plant store and raised like Snoopy's brother Spike.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:48 PM on March 5, 2020 [7 favorites]

This was charming.

My husband once bought a cactus with a red flower and we had it for months (years?) before we noticed that the flower was fake and glued on top. He was so offended! He pried off the flower but we still have the cactus, which has noticeably grown and thus is not fake.
posted by carolr at 3:06 PM on March 5, 2020 [16 favorites]

This would be one of those things that I'd file away as a private shame only brought out in the dead of night on the fourth glass of something for further examination on why I suck. (But still it's funny)
posted by drewbage1847 at 3:21 PM on March 5, 2020 [6 favorites]

(but, yeah... owning a plant for TWO YEARS and seeing no growth at all, and you STILL think it's a real plant? Yikes)

I gave my parents a succulent about a year ago (it's unusual looking and has gorgeous flowers). It's super slow growing and, as far as I can tell, hasn't changed in the slightest since I gave it to them. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's adjusting to its new home and is suddenly going to VA-VOOM.

My mother did actually check to see if I was just messing with them and gave them a fake plant for the lulz.

I did not.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 3:21 PM on March 5, 2020 [13 favorites]

After her Facebook post made its way around the world, the Home Depot near her northern California home hooked her up with a half-dozen actual plants.

Oh god. This is not the outcome of this story that I would want for myself.

That said, the type of person who would have this happen and then joyfully share the tale with her friends (and the world) is definitely my kind of person. I like her.
posted by obfuscation at 3:50 PM on March 5, 2020 [14 favorites]

The fake-plant industry has clearly gotten better at its job since I was dusting the 20-year-old fake plants at my church 30 years ago.
posted by clawsoon at 3:51 PM on March 5, 2020 [9 favorites]

When I was a kid you could buy "air ferns" which needed no water or fertilizer. I bought one and was immediately suspicious when the green dye came off on my hands. [It's a kind of hydrozoan that's dried and tinted]
posted by acrasis at 4:26 PM on March 5, 2020 [5 favorites]

We had airplants in my day.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 5:05 PM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

The plant was fake but the love was real.
posted by notyou at 5:09 PM on March 5, 2020 [10 favorites]

I remember those "air ferns!"
posted by Don Pepino at 5:19 PM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

So I knew you were going to ask for my aloe vera story.

See, spouse and I both have black thumbs. The type where, you just touch any houseplant and it dies.

But someone gave us an aloe vera plant. "It's easy! Just pour some water on it once a month and that's it!"

Well, spouse put it on the weekly watering plan. Pretty soon its looking kind of sickly. Better water it more often, right! More water, more sickly.

Finally one day, "Ok, this thing dead. Let's get rid of it."

Put it out on the back porch, thinking to reuse the sand and pot.

So you can guess what happened next.

About a year later I happen to look at the nook and/or cranny where it has been lodged and completely neglected and unnoticed outside.

"Hey, this thing looks great! It's growing like gangbusters!!!"

So we brought it back inside and the thing grew like gangbusters for years until something happened to it (a bowling ball fell on it or something of that sort--something completely in the "Act of God" category).

The inviolable rule was, "DON'T TOUCH the aloe vera plant. DON'T WATER the aloe vera plant. DON'T DO ANYTHING to the aloe vera plant."

As long as those rules were followed scrupulously (along with, DON'T DROP ANY BOWLING BALLS on the aloe vera plant) it did just great.

We live in a very humid area; as near as I can tell the aloe vera gets all the moisture it needs from the air. If you're watering the aloe vera say once every month or two that is probably around twice too often. Make soil 100% sand, water it say once a year at most.

Any more care than that and you're going to kill it.

So, there is our one blazing success with houseplant growing, right? Just put it in sand, do nothing, success!

You'd think we could repeat that, right?

So about two years ago, after we had sufficiently recovered from the Bowling Ball Incident, someone gives Spouse a nice big aloe vera plant.

"We know what to do with this!" we say to ourselves.

So within a year or two of doing absolutely nothing to it--very definitely our forte--the plant is doing so well it's completely overshadowing its pot. It's a veritable California Redwood of the aloe vera world.

"Time to replant!" says Spouse cheerily.

"Hey what's that--potting soil?" I ask. "Doesn't it need 100% dry sand?"

"Oh, it's just completely 100% dry potting soil. It'll be fine. It's not like we're going to water it--we learned that lesson!"

"Ok--I guess we'll see."

So, we did see. Over the next six months or so our giant beautiful aloe vera plant slowly died from the roots all the way to the tip.

It never has had one single droplet of water poured on it. The soil is always 100% dry as dust to the touch. But that nice loamy potting soil must collect just enough moisture from the air to completely overwhelm the poor desert-acclimatized aloe vera.

When it had finally died all the way up to the final pathetic little green shoot, about the size if a baby's pinky finger, I broke it off and set it on top of the soil, thinking that maybe if its roots had no contact with the soil at all, it would have a chance to survive.

And there it has sat, unchanged or maybe even growing a bit, for about the past year.

"Should replant that in a pot of sand!" I say briskly to myself every time I happen to walk past the pot.

Or maybe set it outside and completely forget about it for a year--that turns out to be our single most effective plant care strategy.

Anyway, that was the situation up until a couple of weeks ago, when someone must have brushed up against the pot and knocked the little shoot off onto the floor, without noticing it. On the floor it get stepped on and smashed pretty good before someone happened to notice it and put it back in the pot.

So . . . our second Bowling Ball Incident? Smashed and done for?

That's what I thought. But this story inspired me to go back and check.

And what do you know--it's still got a little bit of nice-looking green and in fact it appears to be recovering from the Step and Smash incident.

Better go and get a pot of sand and put it in, right now. Oh, yeah--and set it outside and forget about it for a year.

That's definitely our best strategy.
posted by flug at 5:51 PM on March 5, 2020 [44 favorites]

My parents had a little fishing cabin down in southern Indiana. Mom added a bit of color to the place by planting flowers all around it. Plastic flowers.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:52 PM on March 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

She lives with a rubber man in a town full of rubber plans?
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 6:09 PM on March 5, 2020 [5 favorites]

My mother is 81 and has gardened in a serious way her entire life, having first grown up on a farm and then married a farmer. She's quite good at it. During the years that her eight children were growing up, she grew a lot of our food in our garden (i.e., potatoes, beets, carrots, parsnips, lettuce, green and yellow beans, peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, asparagus, onions, rhubarb, strawberries, raspberries, red and black currants, gooseberries, elderberries, and probably some other things I'm not thinking of at the moment), plus she had some substantial, beautiful flowerbeds. She lives in a small town now, but still has a good-sized garden as well as a number of houseplants. There are some things she says she's "never had any luck with" (fruit trees and seeds, namely), but most of the things she tends do very well.

But she'll often mistake silk flowers for real. It's hilarious. About 15 years ago someone gave her a silk orchid. She thought it was real and was watering it until I told her it was fake, and when she didn't believe me, I turned a leaf over and showed her where it was glued together. Then around that same time I won a centrepiece at a company Christmas dinner -- a fake flowering plant in a decorative pot. When Mum saw it she said, "Oh, that's nice!" and went over and smelled it. She said, "Why doesn't it have any scent?" I said, "I think they forgot to put any on at the factory," and she said, "Oh."
posted by orange swan at 6:12 PM on March 5, 2020 [18 favorites]

Department of crazy unbelievable facts. The skew on that average must be insane, like Elton John going broke from buying $500k worth of cut flowers insane.

It looks like that includes lawn and tree care? Which I, as a lowly Millennial, have absolutely no experience with, but from what I've gleaned that can get expensive.

This is a cute story, and a much better outcome than me buying my partner plants from the grocery store multiple times, only for each plant to die horribly and my partner become convinced they're a plant-killer. It was on the third one that their mother finally pointed out that they were all in the wrong kind of pot (cute decorative ones that the store sold them in) and dying from root rot due to not having enough drainage.

Now we just give her plants to raise for us.
posted by brook horse at 7:16 PM on March 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

That's adorable.
posted by bendy at 7:52 PM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

I went to the local hippy garden store last weekend to buy rock phosphate, greensand, and worm castings from their bulk bins (plus a bag of organic leaf mulch compost made by Hmong-immigrant ginseng farmers in central Wisconsin). The place was PACKED with fellow millennials buying expensive houseplants and strategizing on how many bags of potting soil they’ll need to repot their cherished plants at home. I am so glad these alternate universe millennials exist so that they can keep the garden store solvent enough to sell me bizarre seed starting supplies for literal cents per pound.
posted by Maarika at 7:57 PM on March 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

If only she'd put googly eyes on it from the get-go. Then she'd have known where she stood with it.
posted by flabdablet at 9:03 PM on March 5, 2020 [6 favorites]

Oh, yeah--and set it outside and forget about it for a year.

There are several plants that my wife and have found that to be the case with. We had this one lavender that we thought was ded dead. We'd forgotten to water it for the better part of a full year in LA. Dry, brittle, almost a mummy. I planted it in the good in some sort of foolish optimism.

That was two years ago and this fall I had to cut that bastard back because it was threatening the whole seating area.

We planted a 3/4 dead bougenvilla and I just had to rip that one out because it was the devil - it bit you every time you'd walk by it. I planted more lavender. I also on a whim, planted one remnant of that soulless evil in a pot just to see if it would make like a villain in the penultimate scene of a horror flick.
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:13 PM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

My aloe vera does fine in potting soil, and is happy to be watered, I mostly hold back on it a bit so that it will stop outgrowing pots.
posted by tavella at 9:14 PM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

The skew on that average must be insane, like Elton John going broke from buying $500k worth of cut flowers insane.

Succulents Georg buys over thirty million cacti per year and should not have been counted.
posted by mhum at 11:48 PM on March 5, 2020 [7 favorites]

I love this article! And you know what, if you aren’t a big plant person and have never managed to keep a succulent alive for long you might not know that it should get bigger or look different.

orange swan: My mother is 81 and has gardened in a serious way her entire life... But she'll often mistake silk flowers for real. It's hilarious. About 15 years ago someone gave her a silk orchid. She thought it was real and was watering it until I told her it was fake...

Your story about your mom makes me think of a story my own mom told me on herself:

A couple of years ago, my mom’s friend was given an orchid, but because the friend was moving overseas, she immediately gave the orchid to my mom. My mother is good with houseplants in general but had never had an orchid before. So she called my aunt (who has a lot of healthy orchids) and asked her how to look after it. She then followed her instructions to the letter, lovingly watering it and putting it in the exact right spot in the living room and making sure it didn’t get too much direct sunlight.

A few weeks later my aunt comes to visit and my mom proudly shows her the orchid and my aunt says in that way only an older sister can, “I think that orchid is not real.” My mom is like, whatever! My orchid is totally real. However, my aunt had planted a little seed of doubt and so eventually Mom checks and lo and behold, turns out she has been lovingly pampering a fake orchid all this time.

So now when I am out with my mom and I see an orchid I poke her and point at it and we both laugh our heads off.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:15 AM on March 6, 2020 [8 favorites]

I shared this headline this morning at work and it was a lovely way to start the day- tickled many funny bones!
posted by freethefeet at 3:34 AM on March 6, 2020

In my first year of college I picked up a bit of a euphorbia plant that had broken off of a freakin’ enormous one in the university greenhouse. Wrapped it in damp paper towel and brought it to my dorm. Noticed a while later that it was developing tiny bumps on the base as it started to grow new roots, so I planted it. Thing was maybe 3” long at the time.

Fast forward a decade plus to grad school, the plant had outgrown multiple pots, sprouted about a dozen branches and was beginning to develop bark-like thickening at the base. It was getting difficult to move. My wife - who I love dearly but has a black thumb - decided to put it outside on the patio for the season. One late frost later and my plant was green mush... it never recovered.

Her grandmother gave us a small croton plant. She had that plant as long as I had known her - my wife and I started dating in 1990 so the plant was at least 15+ years old when we got it from her - it seemed happy enough until we moved to another state, and unfortunately decided the best place to put the plant during the move was in the car, on a trailer behind the moving truck. By the time we got to our new home the plant had withered and dropped every single leaf it had. We sadly left it on the back porch, unsure how we should dispose of it, while we unpacked. Kind of forgot it was there. Eventually noticed that it was sprouting new tiny leaves. Brought it back inside, amazed it wasn’t dead - it looked healthier than ever once the leaves regrew. That was in 2006. Now, in yet another new state, in our current house, we placed it by a large window - and it went nuts, has flowered several times in the past two years (we had never seen it do that, in almost 30 years of being around or owning it). When we eventually pass it on to our kid, we hope we won’t need a forklift to move it, and will be sure to tell him not to leave it in his car.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:41 AM on March 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

My big issue with plants is that my cats find some of them absolutely delicious. My old lady cat has pretty much killed my previously-luscious pineapple sage, the absolute pride of my container garden. I keep hoping it's going to come back, but whenever it puts out a new leaf, she notices and eats it.
posted by bile and syntax at 6:04 AM on March 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

I kill every plant except one, and that one I keep on the kitchen counter and torture. It's a Walmart rhododendron a student gave me about 20 years ago. I never transplanted it out of its tinytiny pot, just kept it suffering along in there the whole time. It always had four leaves, no more, because it can't make any more than that, having eaten most of the soil in the little pot over its miserable, 20-year life. Still it soldiers gamely on.

A few months ago the key-hanger thing my mom got me because she found it whimsical (it's a wooden plaque with hooks made out of flattened and bent spoon handles that one of her crafting pals made) fell off its hook and severed the four-leafed rhododendron stalk. I was horrified, but I scooped it up and put it in water. I put the 20-year-old tinytiny pot with the no-leafed, ancient blackened stub out on the porch where I wouldn't have to look at it all the time, preparing to throw it away later when I felt up to it emotionally.

The four-leafed stalk in water sprouted roots. When the roots seemed sufficiently robust, I transplanted it into a very slightly larger pot with soil scavenged from another plant I killed. It grew a fifth leaf!

One day I was rabbiting around uselessly out on the porch and saw the tinytiny rhododendron pot sitting off in a forgotten corner. I sucked up courage and went over and picked it up and... there were little tiny green sprouts coming off the ancient stub! I took it back to the kitchen and put it on the windowsill. It has a brand new leaf, now, and two little protoleaves.

TWO PLANTS TO TORTURE!
posted by Don Pepino at 6:33 AM on March 6, 2020 [10 favorites]

Aww I had to give my plants away when I moved out of the country and I really miss them now. Two I had for 10+ years. I saved so many plants from death when people would move out of the apartment complex and leave their plants by the dumpster.

I think the reason I got good at plants was because one of the first plants I had was a peace lily, which is very sensitive to cold and lack of water. So all the plants got watered when that one got droopy and all the plants got brought inside when it because too cold for the peace lily. (Except the Aloe plant, definitely only watered that one like once every couple of months)
posted by LizBoBiz at 6:56 AM on March 6, 2020

I love stories about how people fall in love with things and discover that they are not what they thought they were.

This is especially true in the art world. Somebody pays a ton of money for a piece of art and they hang it on their wall and they love it and they show it to all their guests and everyone gushes over how amazing it is and then one day they discover that its a fake and suddenly they hate it. But, nothing happened to the art work. It's the exact same thing!

Same with this cactus. She loved it for two years. Keep loving it.

But, I also see the other side - the thing hasn't changed, but the context of why you loved it has. And somehow that fundamentally changes your relationship with it. It's a fascinating effect that I'm still trying to wrap my head around.
posted by Phreesh at 10:03 AM on March 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

I was able to keep a spider plant alive in the back of a closet for a couple of years. If you think aloe plants work well with a bit of benign neglect, spider plants take that to the next level. They will shrink back and turn brown, but give them a hint of water and a flicker of sunlight and they come back from the dead.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 11:28 AM on March 6, 2020

So I knew you were going to ask for my aloe vera story.

When I was maybe eight, my little sister, for who knows what reason, took my beloved aloe vera plant, a gift from my grandmother, and put it into this tiny toy blender she had, and mashed it into a pulp. She then dumped the pulp back into the pot. I was furious.

It grew back.
posted by BrashTech at 11:53 AM on March 7, 2020 [7 favorites]

every generation gets the velveteen rabbit it deserves
posted by what does it eat, light? at 9:28 AM on March 8, 2020 [2 favorites]