I don’t want to sound hyperbolic…. but houseplants make life immensely better in almost every way, fixing every evil to lurk. Ok, that’s not true, but it feels close when you are staring at a new leaf gently unfurling.

I’ve been using the best app (Planta) to help me keep them properly nourished and alive. So far it’s working and I’ve only half murdered a fern and made an umbrella plant drop almost all its leaves. But that’s not entirely my fault as I think the umbrella had a mealy bug infestation and was already depressed. I got it from Home Depot which is probably a den of inequality for plants on account of them not being tools. Anyway, I got neem oil and it looks like it might have a new shoot coming in. So after watching it cry foliage like tears and being a constant reminder of my failure as a human on this shared earth – I take these plants very personally- it might be coming back. So yay.

We are so lucky to live somewhere so beautiful. Nestled in the boughs of nature, a forest of trees to immerse and dissolve confusion about life into right at our back door. I love trees and they can take all the things that are hard and sharp in life and make it/us feel small and soft.

We had to cut down a large Blue Spruce in our backyard. It was a massive, old behemoth planted dangerously close to the house and rotting from the inside core. It shed humourlessly sharp and skin piercing needles (because it was diseased/dying the needles were extra aggressive) that summoned many expletives from adults and tears from the kids. It was unfriendly.

After interviewing a few arborists and finally deciding on a small company run by the perfect combination of handsome lumberjack hipsters – non ironic moustaches and all – we had the tree taken down. It felt wrong to lay down something so fast that was so big – it was over 40ft tall and they dropped it right down in it’s entirety. We kept the trunk in large segments to make things from the salvageable wood. And by we, I mean I kept it and everybody else wished we didn’t have large spruce logs all over now. I’ll probably get around to carving some amazing bench and delectable plant holders in 15 years but for now the massive, beautiful logs are sleeping in our garden and remind me of the time they took to grow. And vibrate about how insignificant we must seem to trees, yet are completely intertwined in nature. I’ll continue each day with the hope that plants will save me from myself.