The Mother Plant

by Savannah Cottingham

I have fifty six plants in my kitchen. 

It’s a long-running joke between my husband and me: how many plants can one kitchen hold before it becomes a greenhouse? I once told him about a NASA article, the “Clean Air Study,” that recommended at least one plant per hundred square feet of indoor space. I may have embellished the numbers a bit when I shared it with him, insisting that all these leaves were not indulgent but necessary. Like oxygen. 

He never complains. He’s endlessly supportive, even when I show him the new babies my Peace Lily has pushed up through the soil, or the fresh shoot unfurling from my Zanzibar gem. My best friend named that one ZZ Top before giving it to me. I bought it a companion, Ziggy Pop, to sit beside it on the shelf. When they grow in stride with one another, he always comes into the kitchen to look. 

My mother used to say she wanted to live in a jungle. She’d hang plants in the bathroom, on windowsills, anywhere the walls felt empty. In the corner of the living room hung a Tradescantia, its purple-and-green vines creeping across the ceiling. As I grew older, they reached into the kitchen, then the hallway, stretching toward light the way children stretch toward open doors. When the vines grew too long, or she ran out of ceiling, she cut them back, dropped the clippings into jars of water, and waited for roots to appear like small white questions. Once they did, she planted them in fresh soil. 

Start again. Again and again. 

Tradescantia propagates easily; nodes eager to root, stems forgiving of the blade. Botanists call it resilient. Invasive, even. It doesn’t ask permission to spread. Sometimes, I think about that plant,the mother plant hanging in the corner. About how survival is not always delicate. For some of us it is aggressive. Determined. Always reaching. 

Pieces of us are cut away, rooted elsewhere, replanted. Some thrive. Others don’t. Not even the hardiest plants can survive in poisoned soil. There are exceptions, of course— the prickly ones. The ones that stab if you get too close. Succulents and cacti evolved to hoard water, to survive long droughts in low light. They close their pores at night to keep from losing too much. They endure where others collapse. 

But endurance isn’t the same as flourishing. It isn’t the same as reproduction. Cacti don’t propagate easily. They don’t like to be moved. If I cut a piece from my monkey tail cactus, it would likely rot before it ever rooted. Some forms of survival cost us our ability to multiply, to share ourselves freely. Some forms keep us alive but alone. 

My grandmother loved plants but could never keep them alive. My aunt used to clip pieces from hers, propagating them in the closet, deprived of light. She’d neglect them until they were strong enough to endure it, then bring them to my grandmother, who would nurture them in a neglectful way, depriving them of water in the shade-drawn room of her editing studio. 

Botanists call this etiolation: growth shaped by the absence of light; pale and leggy and desperate. Others might call it longing. 

If I had to describe myself as a plant, I’d like to say that I am resilient enough to be transplanted. 

That I, too, was grown in the closet. I cut a piece of myself from the mother plant long ago and rooted somewhere new, but sometimes I wonder if I’m just a fragment. Not the original. 

Thin and fragile. 

Am I still authentic, or only a successful cutting? 

Plants become rootbound when their containers are too small, roots circling themselves, growth stalled, leaves yellowing despite care. The solution is simple and violent: break the pot. Loosen the roots. Place the plant in new soil. 

First, you have to harm it to help it. 

When we outgrow the spaces we’re given, the same is true. We are forced into something larger. Do we prune ourselves to fit? Are we pruned because we’ve grown too big, too bold, too needy? Or do we do it willingly— cut pieces away, plant them elsewhere, and hope they take? 

There is beauty in that too,in the bravery of a clipping. In the humility of starting small. Even when we feel stripped down to bone, dust and root, plants teach us this: regrowth is a process. 

Leaves change shape in response to light. Roots redirect themselves toward water. 

Survival is not static. It is adaptive. 

Ferns figured this out long before we did. They are ancient, older than flowers, older than seeds. They reproduce through spores, scattered and uncertain, trusting that enough will land somewhere damp and shaded and right. Ferns do not bloom. They unfurl. Slowly. Deliberately. Each new frond a question mark easing itself open. 

I think about ferns when I think about children of abuse. Many of us grow in the understory, shaped by what blocks the sun. We learn patience not because we are calm but because there is no other option. Ferns thrive where others fail, but they cannot tolerate drought. They need moisture. They need community— shade trees, the forest floor, a system that holds water long enough for them to drink. 

None of us survive alone. Some of us learn this first in the understory. Others only understand it once we climb high enough to be exposed. 

In the summers, I go huckleberry picking. We drive high, thousands of feet up, winding through mountain roads where the air grows thin the higher we climb. Huckleberries refuse low elevations. They need cold winters, acidic soil, stress. They refuse to be domesticated. You cannot plant them just anywhere and expect them to comply. Biologists say huckleberries’ fruit best after disturbance: fire, avalanche, disruption. The soil must be altered, light must reach the forest floor. Only then do they appear, small and dark and sweet, staining your fingers purple like the skin of my girlhood self. 

In western Montana alone, there are seven species of wild huckleberries, clinging to fractured soil and steep slopes. Among them are the big black huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceum), the spreading blue huckleberry (V. globulare), and the stout, oval-leafed huckleberry (V. ovalifolium)—each adapted to a slightly different niche of shade, soil, and elevation, refusing uniformity the way wild things do. Huckleberries, like many wild species, are fire-adapted as well: after a burn clears competing shrubs and opens gaps in the forest canopy, berry production often increases for years as the thicket regenerates. You find them where the earth has been broken, where light can touch the soil bare of its older armor. 

Research on survivors of childhood adversity shows that while maltreatment increases risk for negative outcomes overall, individuals with strong adaptive resources, personal meaning-making, and coping strategies can show post-traumatic growth and a capacity to thrive despite early harm. In some models, resilience acts as an intervening force between adverse childhood experiences and positive psychological change later in life, suggesting that growth does not erase trauma but emerges from how we respond to it. 

Just like huckleberries wait for disturbance and light to fruit, people who have known deep shadows sometimes carry within them the hard-won capacity to reach toward the sun, to produce sweetness where soil was once poor. 

Like plants under constant threat, we learn when to move our resources. 

Spider plants understand this. When stressed, they produce runners—long stems that reach outward, creating babies at the end. A way of saying: if I cannot be safe here, maybe part of me can be safe somewhere else. Snake plants do the opposite. They shut down, store water, wait. Their leaves are thick, upright, and difficult to damage. They are called unkillable for a reason. 

My monstera carries holes in its leaves— fenestrations, botanists say. Not damage, but design. In the wild, those holes allow wind to pass through, reduce tearing, let light reach lower leaves. What looks like injury is actually adaptation. 

I hid bruises as a child the way monstera leaves hide light: long sleeves, strategic silence, the careful choreography of not being seen. 

When my best friend moved to Indiana, she gave me her office plants, making my kitchen count go from thirty-three to fifty-six—partly because her husband wouldn’t let her take them on the long U-Haul drive, partly because they carried the weight of what she was trying to leave behind. Plants absorb memory whether we want them to or not. Soil remembers. 

Among those plants was a cutting from a mother plant her great-grandmother had started: an angel-wing begonia, leaves wide and soft, freckled red like they’d been kissed too hard by the sun. Begonias propagate from a single leaf if you know where to cut. I keep it in the corner of my kitchen now. I’ve taken babies from it, watched roots bloom in water, counted my number grow by one. 

On days when I miss her, I talk to them. Studies say plants respond not to affection but to consistency: care, attention over time. 

My estranged father showed up to my house recently. He sat at my kitchen table, meeting some of my kids for the first time, marveling at their Nerf guns and Lego city creations. 

He sat quietly, letting his gaze drift over the kitchen as I cooked dinner. After a long moment, he looked at me and said, “I really love all the plants. It reminds me of home. I haven’t felt that in a long time.” 

But home is not a place. It is a condition. 

I tried so hard to escape my childhood. To escape the fear, the slammed doors, the broken dishes. I thought survival meant severing myself completely. But standing there, surrounded by leaves and light, I realized there were pieces I had carried with me all along. 

The love of plants. 

The instinct to nurture. 

The way I build rooms that breathe. 

Plants inherit traits from their mother stock: growth patterns, resilience, vulnerability. Trauma, too, leaves an inheritance. So does care. Maybe we don’t escape where we come from so much as decide what we will propagate. 

A mother plant is only a mother while the ground lets her give. When the soil turns poisonous, the lineage breaks. By ten, mine had. 

A cutting becomes something else once it roots; once it no longer borrows life, once it makes its own. 

By fourteen, I had become an origin. 

Like the ferns unfurl. 

Like the huckleberries wait for fire. 

Like the monstera turns wounds into architecture. 

We grow anyway. 

Lineage is not a straight stem. It branches. It breaks. It roots where it can. Some of us begin as cuttings. Some of us learn to hold water. Some of us wait years for fire. 

In the kitchen, leaves turn slowly toward the window. New growth appears where there was none. 

Whatever we are called—the mother plant, the fragment, the survivor—we keep reaching. Toward the light.