Cactus? I have one that gets watered every once in a moon and lives in the bathroom where the climate switches from tropics to arctic to desert every few hours.
Grow them in a poorly lit room for a while, then suddenly move them into a full sun window or even outdoors. Grow them super dry and forget about them for a couple of years, then suddenly start watering them regularly in the middle of winter. Simply water them too much all year round. Ignore them entirely until they become infested with scale insects. Leave them outside on a bitterly cold night with a hard freeze (obviously doesn’t apply to temperate species).
Realistically what I often see is that a lot of cacti are very good at persisting in very poor conditions for very long periods of time because they’re adapted to going dormant and slowly growing during tough times and short windows of good times. That doesn’t mean this is the case for all cacti, of course.
And the number of times I’ve seen obviously dead cactus husks in offices and people’s homes where the humans in their lives are completely oblivious to the fact that their cactus house plant is super dead is … well, it’s probably in the double digits. Which is kind of a lot under the circumstances.
I had a coworker once who grew a cactus on his desk. I mentioned to him that I think it’s dead, but I never pushed too hard. He brought up the fact that he got the plant when he was in college and that was about 15 to 20 years prior, so I didn’t push the “it’s dead Jim” theory very much. Then one day he decided it was time to repot the cactus. The carcass fell over. It was a long-dead, dried husk with a thin veneer of thorns and that’s all. No, I didn’t rub it in that I’d told him it was dead years prior.
Cactus? I have one that gets watered every once in a moon and lives in the bathroom where the climate switches from tropics to arctic to desert every few hours.
Most cacti are very easy to kill, though.
Grow them in a poorly lit room for a while, then suddenly move them into a full sun window or even outdoors. Grow them super dry and forget about them for a couple of years, then suddenly start watering them regularly in the middle of winter. Simply water them too much all year round. Ignore them entirely until they become infested with scale insects. Leave them outside on a bitterly cold night with a hard freeze (obviously doesn’t apply to temperate species).
Realistically what I often see is that a lot of cacti are very good at persisting in very poor conditions for very long periods of time because they’re adapted to going dormant and slowly growing during tough times and short windows of good times. That doesn’t mean this is the case for all cacti, of course.
And the number of times I’ve seen obviously dead cactus husks in offices and people’s homes where the humans in their lives are completely oblivious to the fact that their cactus house plant is super dead is … well, it’s probably in the double digits. Which is kind of a lot under the circumstances.
I had a coworker once who grew a cactus on his desk. I mentioned to him that I think it’s dead, but I never pushed too hard. He brought up the fact that he got the plant when he was in college and that was about 15 to 20 years prior, so I didn’t push the “it’s dead Jim” theory very much. Then one day he decided it was time to repot the cactus. The carcass fell over. It was a long-dead, dried husk with a thin veneer of thorns and that’s all. No, I didn’t rub it in that I’d told him it was dead years prior.