The World Always Needs Plants

My grandma Caty never wrote anything down. No recipes, no instructions, no advice on paper. If you wanted to know what she knew, you had to stand next to her while she worked — and she was always working on something green.

She grew plants in whatever the world gave her. Coffee cans. Cracked buckets. A pot somebody put out on the curb because it was chipped. She'd take cuttings from plants people were throwing away, stick them in water on the windowsill, and a month later there'd be roots. There were always roots. I never once saw her give up on a plant, and I'm not sure the plants would have let her anyway.

And she was always germinating seeds. Always. There was never a windowsill in her house that didn't have something starting on it — seeds tucked into damp soil, little cups of dirt she'd check every morning like they had appointments. She had a saying about that, too:

And she used to say one thing — the thing I've been carrying around my whole life:

What I thought it meant

When I was a kid, I thought it was practical advice. Grandma Caty was a practical woman. I figured she meant something like: plants are useful — learn this and you'll always have something. Food comes from plants. Medicine comes from plants. Shade comes from plants. The world runs on green, so green is a safe bet.

And she wasn't wrong about that. I built a whole business on it. People ask me if I worry about work drying up, and I tell them what she told me. Nobody ever says, "You know what this house has too much of? Life."

But the older I get, the more I think she meant something bigger.

What I think it means now

Here's what I've noticed doing this work, going house to house, office to office:

People bring plants into every season of their life. Every one.

Somebody gets their first apartment — they buy a plant. Somebody has a baby — the hospital room fills with green. Somebody loses a person they love — we send plants, because flowers die in a week and a plant says this grief will be tended for a long time. Somebody goes through a breakup, a diagnosis, a layoff, a year that flattens them — and I promise you, somewhere in that season, they end up standing in a nursery holding a pothos, not entirely sure why.

And when the whole world shut down a few years back — when everything was uncertain and everyone was stuck inside — what did people do? They bought plants. Millions of them. The hardest season most of us ever shared, and the world reached for green.

That's what Grandma Caty knew. The world doesn't need plants the way it needs gasoline. It needs plants the way it needs hope.

The conditions business

Watching Grandma Caty start seeds taught me something I use every single day, on plants and on people.

When she planted a seed, nothing happened for days. Sometimes weeks. And she never once dug it up to check on it. She didn't yell at it. She didn't decide it was a bad seed. If something wasn't sprouting, she asked one question: what's missing? More warmth? More moisture? Better light? She'd adjust the conditions — and then she'd wait like she already knew the ending.

Because here's the thing she understood: you can't make a seed grow. Nobody can. The growing is already inside it. All you can do — all anyone can ever do — is get the conditions right and trust what's in there.

I think about that constantly with people. When somebody's struggling — not growing, not blooming, stuck in the dirt — we're so quick to decide something's wrong with them. Bad seed. But Grandma Caty would have asked her question: what conditions are missing? Rest? Light? Somebody checking on them every morning like they have an appointment?

People almost never fail. Their conditions do.

That's my whole job now, honestly. I don't make anything grow — I never have. The plant already knows how. I just show up and fix the conditions: the light, the water, the soil, the pot that got too small. Grandma Caty's question, asked professionally, house by house.

The cheapest hope there is

A plant is a small bet that the future is coming. You don't water something today unless some part of you believes in next month. You don't repot something unless you're planning on it getting bigger.

I think that's why people in hard seasons buy plants without knowing why. Tending something alive is medicine. It gives your hands a job and your heart some proof — proof that care works, that things respond to attention, that something in your world is growing even when you're not sure you are.

Grandma Caty grew plants in coffee cans through years that were not easy on her. I don't think that was a coincidence. I think the cans full of green on her windowsill were her way of saying: we're still here, and we're still growing.

Why it's on the sign

So when people ask why a grown man drives around Southeast LA making house calls for plants, this is the real answer.

Every plant I keep alive in somebody's home or office — that's Grandma Caty, still working. Every cutting I root, every "dead" plant I bring back, every client I talk out of giving up on their fiddle leaf fig — that's her sentence, still true.

The world always needs plants.

It needed them in her kitchen window. It needs them in your living room. It'll need them long after all of us — which, honestly, is the most comforting job security there is.

Keep it green.