I Just Get Really Emotional About The Plant Okay - Tumblr Posts

I don’t know if anyone here is like super into plants but since it’s Earth day, I figured I’d show y’all my basil plant.

So I got this dude almost a year ago because my college was giving out little cups full of dirt and plant seeds. I think plants are neat as a concept, so of course I’m gonna get one. For the next couple weeks I’ve got this cup of dirt sitting on my window sill and when I drive home to my parents every weekend I take the plant with me (gotta water him, he was just a little baby plant at the time) and eventually he started sprouting (pictures above).

As a geologist, I exclusively study rocks and I know like zero things about plants. Organics are not my cup of tea and before I got the basil plant, I had never really seen a plant grow up before (I’ve had a plant in the past but it’s life ended in horrific tragedy and frankly I don’t like to think about it, though I consider it a learning experience) so I had this like mind awakening experience like “I put time and effort into this and now it’s growing up Right before my eyes” (listen listen, I know plants grow, but I’ve never tracked the progress of one and it was really cool to see)

So after that point, I became super invested in the basil plant. I moved it from the cup and to a suitable plant pot, I looked into and bought some kind of nutrient rich soil, and I made sure that the basil plant had all the Sun it needed (I would track weather patterns and sunrise/sundown times to make sure that at all points in the life of this plant it would have all needs 100% met), and I think that my Mom noticed I was super invested in the plant so she had our gardener also take care of it too since he knows everything about plants I think.

So things are looking great and the plant is getting tall and it has a few leaves on it, but since I got the plant in the fall, by this time it’s getting to be cold outside. I looked up survivable temperatures for basil plants and every site I looked at said that the plant would die during the night if the temp dropped too low. Guys, I have so much emotion invested into this plant that I’d probably fall into some sort of plant based cycle of grief if it died. I move that bad boy inside so it stays warm, but the reduction of sunlight definitely took its toll. The stem turned from free to brown and all of the leaves except one died

Here is a drawing of me watering the plant with my tears because I was sad that it might die. Well, it turns out basil plants are way more resilient than I gave them credit for because this mother fucker hung on that thread for MONTHS. In these past few weeks, now that it’s been way warmer, the plant has never looked better! The stem is still dead looking but I’ve never seen so many leaves on it—

Here is the plant now, growing strong. If there are any plant people with knowledge untold who come across this, can y’all confirm if the stem will stay brown or like rejuvenate? Anyway, happy Earth Day! 🌎 🌱 🪴