The Moral Virtue of Houseplants

By Emily A. Backus

Revelation struck in the kitchen while wiping lentil purèe from the plastic tray of my toddler’s high chair. I turned to the sink and looked at the blue hyacinth blooming in the window, a scepter of flowers peeled back in interconnected arabesques, pushing my thoughts to Moorish facades, filigree, the Fibonacci sets, and fractal patterns. Spiralling down the intricate geometries of plant and shell forms, away from the sponge in my hand and its sopping goo, my mind landed again on those tiny blooms, this time as the witness to something miraculous. It dawned on me that the hyacinth’s structure had precipitated out of air and light. This houseplant had accomplished, in its mindless, brainless, unconscious being, a transmutation as extraordinary as an alchemist’s most outlandish aspirations. With the help of little water and dirt, my muddy bulb had harnessed Milan’s greyish rays to grab atoms out of the winter’s stagnant flecked gases to build a fluted, sapphire architecture. My hyacinth was shucking carbon from air to use as clay to sculpt itself, while adorning our space and exuding oxygen and water. It was an epitome of self-sufficiency, artistry, and virtuous chemical engineering.

I then thought how every plant in the house, and every shrub and tree in the street, was engaged in such industry. And while I had known about photosynthesis, carbon fixation and transpiration since school, and had loved and appreciated the wilderness for as long as I had been aware, I had never been so conscious of sacred mansions of the kindly houseplant or the heroic wizardry of crab grass ramming through a fissure in an asphalt sidewalk. Without intention and occupying nearly the lowest rung in Milan’s urban ecosystem – a notch above mosquitos and cockroaches, but well below parking places – these beings embodied a kind of moral virtue. Or so it seemed to me were it not for transgressions like allergenic pollens, natural poisons, carbon reoxidation, and occasional unsightliness.

I later bought a book called “How to Grow Fresh Air,” by Dr. B.C. Wolverton, that advised me to stock my home with certain houseplants like lady palms, peace lilies, king of hearts, and Boston ferns. NASA had proven in the 1980s that these not only gave off more oxygen than run-of-the-mill house plants, but removed household chemicals from the air and reduced microbe colonies. Thus, I learned plants existed that did nothing but redeem our collective environmental sins.

I bought many of the recommended species and thought of testing them against a moral touchstone attributed to Pope John Paul II by an Italian newspaper. The article reported that the Polish pope, after a long intellectual quest with like-minded philosophical explorers, had struck upon the essence of Good, which was to “sacrifice oneself in the service of others”. This definition hit me as oddly secular for the pope. Although it did follow the imprint set by Christ and saintly martyrs, it did not require faith, nor did it require one to be Christian. It placed the sacrifices of all mothers for their children on the same plane, no matter their race or religion. War heroes of any just cause were equally venerable. The good Samaritan was truly Good.

This view seemed to contradict my personal Catholic authority, our Mexican babysitter, who told me that throughout Sunday school and weekly masses she had learned the nature of Good was “to serve God”, which defies impartial vetting of any sort, unless there is a rational, benevolent explanation of what God wants. It was easy to see how acting in the name of God could lead to religious wars, inquisitions, witch hunts, tyrannical rules or rites, and suicide bombers. But the pope’s answer, instead, was ecumenical, independent, reasoned, transparent. Moral nobility would be bestowed on all paragons of altruism, be they Hindus, like Mahatma Gandhi, or pagan, like Socrates. The pope had enshrined selflessness.

I didn’t like it, because it wasn’t pro-life. It did not promote and support lives to help them flourish. The pope’s definition did not elevate thriving, adapting, being resourceful, or cultivating the capacity to give and continue giving. It did not honor taking care of oneself or Adam Smith’s brilliant articulation of “enlightened self-interest”. In the Pope’s view, the coal miner who labored to feed his family, undermining his own health and the world’s, would hold the moral high ground over his sister who became a doctor; the community volunteer who wore his nerves raw pleasing everyone but himself would be more virtuous than the community volunteer who found purpose, focus, and fulfillment in his work. It stumped me that pyrrhic victories could possibly offer “better” outcomes than those that avoided self-destruction. If everyone were to practice extreme self-sacrifice in the service of others, all would be ruined and none would reap the fruits of all this generosity and compassion. All one needs is two such actors – like the ill-fated couple, Della and Jim, in O.Henry’s “Gift of the Magi” – to see how selflessness requires asymmetry. It needs a beneficiary who does not respond in kind or else the gift is meaningless. Della sold her lustrous hair to give Jim a gold watch chain for Christmas, and Jim sold his gold pocket watch to give Della a set of fancy combs for her hair, leaving both more destitute than before. O. Henry may think this is an exquisite display of the highest virtue, but it is exactly what renders the story tragic. Enshrining enlightened masochism on the altar of highest virtue is not a recipe for peace and heaven on earth. On the contrary, it can only offer affliction if we do it in concert, or a virtuous elite with endemic sin for the rest of us who refuse to counter our inborn desire to thrive.

Thus it was that I landed upon a possible new definition of good: “self-interest in the service of others”. This struck me as sufficiently win-win to pass muster with the non-zero sum Zeitgeist that bubbled through our times, from celebrity self-help gurus like Steven Covey to ivory tower intellectuals at the Harvard Negotiation Project. This idea suggests well-defined operating principles for everyday decisions. It says we should all search for the most constructive solutions with the fewest destructive collateral effects.

This may sound well and good, however, until one bangs one’s head against an awful lot cultural, institutional, and emotional fortresses in the way. Justice, altruism, honor, principle, tradition, pride, norms and even integrity are placed at risk by this pragmatic sort of Good. It could sanction complicity, collusion, spinelessness, and succor to the enemy. Conflict of interest could become confluence of interest. And depending on one’s religion, Good could come at the cost of spirituality, too.

After my mother passed away, I had to clear out my things from the house where I grew up so that my brothers and I could sell it. Halfway through the tears, smiles, and tedium of old papers, photographs, and yearbooks, I came across a 1986 college textbook, Biology of Plants, by Raven, Evert and Eichorn. It offered an astonishing creation story. Four and a half billion years ago, our earth, “an accretion of dust and gases swirling in orbit around the star that is our sun,” roiled with volcanoes exploding into a thin atmosphere of nitrogen, carbon-dioxide and water vapor. Violent storms and lightning thrashed the cooling crust of the earth. Electricity, radiation and the energy of molten rock split gases, and thus formed complex molecules. Out of this primordial soup emerged two fundamental types of life: the heterotrophs, which fed upon the complex molecules, and, much later – due to scarcity of resources gobbled up by the heterotrophs – the autotrophs, or self-feeders, that devised means of nourishment from the simplest of elements, like nitrogen, carbon-dioxide and light. We are heterotrophs. Most green plants are autotrophs, and all life on earth owes its existence to them. The earth was anaerobic before they came about, so we owe them our very breath as well as the food we put on the table.

There is something transcendent about individual self-sacrifice in the service of others. Honor, awe, and reverence do seem appropriate. But life on earth became sustainable, complex, and breathtaking by other means. The universal mother that keeps nature’s sublime, savage drama from extinguishing itself is autotrophic. The way it lives intrinsically supports other lives: when it flourishes, so, too, do others. And it does this by recycling simple elements into nourishing complexity, without preying on other complex organisms.

I think it is time for me to buy a few more plants, perhaps a moth orchid, a wax begonia, a weeping fig. I am tempted to emulate their ways, to interpret and integrate their inspiration into the fabric of my life. Perhaps I can sidestep questions of justice, altruism, honor, principle, tradition, and pride. Mindfulness classes have taught me to simply be, trust, not judge, and let go. My mindfulness teacher read to us a Mary Oliver poem on the good life. ‘Wild Geese’ offers this advice, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

It seems to me, though, that such counsel is only sound as long as I don’t love things like victory, my neighbor’s husband, crushing others under foot, or other dark temptations burbling from my reptilian brain and limbic system. Oliver’s counsel reminds me that I am not a plant, and that plants can not defend themselves as individuals, natural venoms notwithstanding. I was born with claws and teeth and a will to survive, even dominate. Win-win is not always possible, and plants are consumed, hacked and uprooted en masse without the slightest sympathy – not even from vegans – on a daily basis. I am not okay with extreme vulnerability, open to being struck down like a corn stalk or an oak, and I do come with all the usual human baggage.

The new pontiff, Pope Francis, strikes me as a wise, kindly soul with genuine concern for creation as it really is. I wonder if he could crack the riddle.

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