Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how houseplant collectors create communities of practice where they share their plant-keeping experiences. Through repetitive and attentive care, collectors learn to communicate with their plants to fulfil the latter’s needs, blurring the lines between trainer and trainee.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how houseplant collectors train themselves and their plants. To ensure that tropical plants can survive in a European domestic environment, collectors need to train the plants to adapt to their home conditions and aesthetic desires. Trailing and climbing species need to be taught to hang or attach themselves to a supporting structure so they can reach maturity or simply look attractive. Variegated plants must get certain leaves trimmed to ensure the correct colour pattern. Plants must adjust to their growing medium, being trained to survive in soil, water, or moss to adapt to the owner’s preferences. Learning those training techniques is a long process, which is often also social. Collectors create communities of practice online, where they share their experiences in plant care and exchange advice. Newcomers can imitate successful techniques and progressively become more skilled plant trainers, ensuring that their vegetal companions thrive. However, the knowledge publicly shared is created through more intimate relations. It is through repetitive and attentive care that collectors learn to read their plants. Drawing on ethnographic work among houseplant collectors, this paper will explore how experimenting with care techniques enables collectors to train to see and feel the plants, eventually being able to communicate with them and understand their needs and desires. Ultimately it becomes unclear who trains who: are humans training plants to adapt to a new environment or are plants training humans to sustain them?