Lessons from Plants: Late-Winter 2025 Edition

Root-bound + down, down, down

Hello friends,

I hope you are faring OK in late-winter. It’s hard out there. It’s winter until *boooinggg!* all of a sudden it’s spring. The Spring Equinox is March 20 (although we know winter is a loiterer) so right at the buzzer, here’s the winter edition of lessons from plants. If you’re new here, you should know that I am a biomimic, trying to glean as much wisdom as I possibly can from the natural world. This often begins with my verdant roommates, my houseplants. I started this series — Lessons from Plants — last year and you can find previous ones in the “Garden Bed” section or here, here, and here.

I also lead monthly plant-inspired dharma talks and meditations at a local plant nursery, and if you’re even in LA, please join us.

In December’s year-end edition, I reflected on this lesson:

Be mindful not to get root bound. Some plants like to be cozy in a small pot, and others need lots of room. When they become “root bound” the limits of their space mean they begin to stymie their own growth. Their own roots start to choke them. You know what I mean if you’ve ever stayed too long in a place, situation, or relationship. It’s OK if you have! What does it require to un-root bind yourself and what does it mean to move to a bigger pot? Truly get the space you deserve? What next?

I wrote all this shit, and meant it! But I also let three months go by as a beloved plant got more and more root-bound.

Just saying that “the perfect plant mother” is a myth.

It had been nagging me, though, slinking around in the back of my head. That she might be root-bound. This monstera which I had cultivated last year through propagating two other monsteras of mine. An arranged marriage of sorts.

But I liked the pot she was in! And “her look.” And in general, things “seemed fine.” (You know the vibe). I had moved her around to different locations with differing light, and watered her voraciously, and changing conditions still weren’t creating any change in her at all. That was a giant clue I could no longer ignore.

She wasn’t obviously dying per se, but she was just… frozen. Technically green and perky but kind of dull and certainly no growth. She had no energy, or life force.

Becoming root-bound can be such a slow, incremental process that it’s hard to acknowledge. And when we’re root bound it’s not usually an emergency (until it is). So it affords us the time we need to wake up to the reality. We can go on pretty well even when we’re root-bound. Look good, sound good, achieve great things at work, play the part if you know what I mean! We are just that talented and resilient.

But underneath, our roots are just wrapping around ourselves with no where else to go and our growth potential is slowly winnowing.

And if you’re not growing, you’re not changing but rather slowly dying. This is true.

The reason I woke up to this reality is that recently I was feeling anxious and decided to tend to my plants. Have you ever noticed that sometimes distracting yourself from the wallow of your experience can help you move through it? Not that you’re avoiding or repressing it, but engaging in other work — tending to something or someone else — helps you walk around the other side of your heaviness and see through it in new ways. Oh here’s a little crack of light.

And when you shift perspective and really take a look, you gotta be honest with yourself. So I was trying to do that with my own shit, while also doing that with my monstera’s shit.

As I took a closer look at her base and her soil for the first time in a very long time, what I saw told me everything I needed to know. Thick roots visible from the top, imagine what is below…

I used a butter knife slid along the sides to un-pry her from her terracotta prison, like a pound cake in a pan not greased well enough (a toxic trait of mine!).

Often it takes something traumatic (little t), violent (little v), or otherwise jolting or catastrophic to loosen us from the spaces where we have become root-bound. To shake us from our slumber and make us even *realize* we’ve been root-bound.

This happened to me in my late-twenties, as I’ve written about before, when a series of traumatic events unmoored me from every facet of my life at the time (relationship, job, body, home) and thank GOD it did because I discovered how truly unhappy and stifled I had been.

It’s wonderful and terrifying how adaptable we humans are - we can find a way to survive in almost any condition. This is a strength and a deep, deep weakness. You have to keep auditing and most of all you have to be wildly honest with yourself. Practice helps with that. The more you are honest with yourself, the easier and more comfortable it becomes to stay honest with yourself.

Anyway, look at my poor baby! Look at how resilient she is! Surviving IN SPITE OF. Look at how cozy and how suffocated! Look at how small she was keeping herself. WOOF.

I began the work to transfer her from this veritable nutshell of a pot to something more luxurious.

I added lots of new soil, mixed in some worm castings, and then sprinkled some blood meal on top before giving her a torrential watering and letting her SIT. Just sitting with the reality of new space. Just taking it all in.

When you transplant a plant, like when you transition as a human, there is a lag. You need time to catch up: what the hell just happened?! Where am I, how do I feel, how is my heart, where can I put my roots?

Then the let down begins.

I put her right by the entrance of my apartment so she could get healthy dose of indirect light and take up all the damn space. I was feeling guilty that I waited so long to move her to a bigger pot, but in the end, it takes the time it takes to arrive at these conclusions of what we need *and also* do the work to resource ourselves in that way.

I do think it’s wise to consider, what if we changed our conditions before we became stagnant? And sometimes that’s possible, and that’s wonderful.

But also, I think the experience of stagnancy is powerful because it is catalytic. What does it feel like when you’re root-bound? When you are stuck, or you’ve outgrown, or you need or want more but can’t quite get it?

What does it feel like in your body, and what do you do next?

In the wellness / self-help world there’s a common phrasing to “let go of that which does not serve you.” Why does everything and everyone have to serve me?

I think a better framing might be to consider whether situations, relationships, and things… are facilitating joy, bouyancy, insight, and growth. They might facilitate any one of those things or all of them. But I think if something doesn’t facilitate any of them — and you really gotta be honest with yourself here — then you’ve got a root-binding goblin on your hands.

Just because things are the way they are, doesn’t mean that the way they’re “supposed” to be. Transformation begins with outer awareness paired with inner reflection. And sometimes you just need to get your shit together and do the thing you know you’ve needed to do for a long time.

The repotted monstera is still spreading out and deepening her breath (I am waiting for new growth - I know it’s coming, but it takes TIME!). Her leaves are gently weeping from the deep watering she received after moving homes. I love this about monsteras - droplets collecting at the delicate tips of their leaves.

Under the canopy of her great leaves, I was putting my son’s tiny boots on to head out into the rain when a drop from her leaf plopped right on his head. He stopped, surprised. “Wawa.”