The Aroids of Our Time
By: Aimee Dyamond
Tags: Capitalism, Plants, Mental Health, Houseplants, Millennials

Aroids, which make up some of our most recognizable houseplants, belong to a subset of modern plant aristocracy, the Araceae family. Despite their origins in the New World tropics, aroids find themselves resident in rented apartments all over the globe. Priced out of home ownership and resigned to indefinite tenancy, our rootless generation gravitates naturally towards aroids. To own one, or several, is to enjoy a sense of daily achievement, the thrill of keeping something alive. Aroid conservatorship offers us a degree of small, low-stakes responsibility without the gravity of caring for a pet or child. Let’s face it — you can kill a plant by accident and not face any major moral or legal consequences.

Photo by vadim kaipov on Unsplash

The millennial narrative is defined by a series of unfortunate economic events: emerging from university into a global recession, earning salaries insufficient to cover mortgages, delayed marriage and parenthood. And now, with a global pandemic threatening our already tenuous economic future, we tend to consume in smaller, more frivolous ways. The proverbial Starbucks, the iPhones, the travelling paradox for which our generation is often berated are minor expenses compared to the financial clout and stability required to secure and maintain a thirty-year mortgage. Among our favorite comfort buys— aroids. Monstera deliciosa, perhaps the best-loved of these, became the poster-plant of the modern indoor gardening rush some time in the 2010s. Adored by millennials and their younger counterparts, Monstera and the rest of its lush, monocotyledonous family provide us with the illusion of having our own piece of ground from which sprouts green, alive things.

Humans of the early 21st century were not the first to start a houseplant craze. In the 19th century, Victorian Britain enjoyed a fifty-year obsession with ferns. The craze was so notable that, in 1855, the writer Charles Kingsley coined the term pteridomania, wryly referring to fern-collecting young girls whose fashionable new hobby was, in Kingsley’s opinion, more agreeable than duller, less intellectual pursuits like crochet, gossiping and Berlin wool embroidery. There was an obvious element of throwaway consumerism in the fern craze. Victorian fern enthusiasts collected books, magazines and digests on the subject, much like how a modern person, having recently taken up film photography in the digital age, might buy every decently-rated book on the subject in Amazon’s cache to convey an impression of commitment to their new hobby. Since pteridology — fern studies — was still a relatively nascent field, the publications’ authors often coined different names for the same plants and agreed to disagree.

Fernery at the Geelong Botanical Gardens, Australia in the late 19th century

Fern fever went beyond mere cultivation and identification. Architecture, literature, decorative arts and expeditions paid homage to middle-class Britain’s botanical muse. Clearly, Victorians occupied their time in strange, luxurious ways. They went on fern hunts, expeditions for sourcing the most exotic, unusual plants. Localized fern hunting served as a popular theme for ladies’ tea parties. For snagging desirable specimens growing in treacherous rocky outcrops or quick-flowing brooks, a guild of professional fern hunters answered the demand. Some die-hards traveled further afield to the jungles of New Zealand and Papua New Guinea for the finest exotic fronds. For some unlucky fern-atics, the pursuit was lethal. In 1867, Jane Myers plummeted to her death while gathering ferns on a cliff edge in Perthshire, Scotland. Perhaps Charles Kingsley might’ve advised Miss Myers to stick with safer, less daring hobbies after all.

The Fern Gatherer by Charles Sillem Lidderdale (1877)

Back in England, the well-heeled built dedicated spaces for housing and displaying their fern collections. In the first half of the 1800s, George Loddiges, author of the serial Botanical Cabinet and botanical celebrity of the day, built one of the world’s largest greenhouses, the Grand Palm House, in London. To attract visitors to his new ornament, Loddiges hyped up the fern rhetoric, punting claims that ferns, and fern-collecting, boosted virility, improved mental health, and were a sign of intelligence. He may have been right about the mental health bit.