Orchids, succulents, and success
“Follow your passions.” If you’re under the age of 50, I’m sure you too have heard some version of that as career advice. No doubt all of us from Gen X on down are reacting against that dispiriting image of the grizzled Boomer Dad grimly reporting to his prison/factory job every day for 30 years, the spark of life gradually retreating from his eyes. God help us, we weren’t going to approach work like that! So we followed our passions, just as how after watching The Orchid Thief, many of us were inspired to try to grow orchids as our houseplants.
But you know what? Orchids are really hard. Turns out that just “following your passions” with orchids will just get you a bunch of dead orchids. To keep those finicky little buggers alive, you need the right actions and conditions as well.
3-way venn diagram: orchids and failure (no overlap)
For years, I would’ve considered myself an average gardener/plant dad at best: our pythos plants (the ones with the heart-shaped leaves that you can propagate from a small cutting, and then they grow to these massive snakelike hanging jungles) survived, but orchids, cacti, and everything else I didn’t know the name of I managed to kill.
Then, sometime mid-pandemic, we had the light-bulb moment. Trapped at home but craving some sort of change, my wife’s restless gaze fell on our front yard, which she had always disliked. It was planted in an assortment of agapanthus, Japanese Irises, and lavender, all of which were drought-tolerant and produced some shade of purple flowers, but which had the vaguely annoying overgrown quality of a kid long overdue for a haircut. They were not bad plants, but they were not plants we had chosen.
Coinciding with our urge for change and latent irritation was a visit to a neighbor wherein she bestowed a basketful of succulent cuttings on us, with the encouraging word that “You just put ‘em in the ground and they sorta go wild!”
So that did it: Laura grabbed the shovel, and took out months of pandemic frustration uprooting most of the clump of lavender in the center of the front yard, and a bunch of the irises as well. These plants had been in place for over a decade, so it was a real battle of wills. But I joined in too, and gnarled roots eventually yielded to metal tools and human aggression.
I dug out an S-curved path through the center, heaping up berms on either side to give the erstwhile rectilinear front yard some rhythm and texture. Inspired by a neighbor’s professional landscaping, I lined up a series of football-to-basketball-sized rocks atop one of the berms, and planted the Aeonium cuttings in between the rocks. And with that, the Great Front Yard Re-org was on. It looked a little bare at first, but since so many neighbors also have succulents in their yards, we could steadily populate ours just with cuttings, green-bin castoffs, and broken pieces on sidewalks.
Less than two years later, the majority of the transplants have gotten established, and the front yard is well on its way to achieving the “coral reef above ground” look we hoped for, a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors.
So why am I blogging about this here? Because there’s an interesting parallel between our succulent adventures and vocational fulfillment and success — and it has to do with the third circle in this Venn diagram. When so many of us (myself included for many years) think about vocation, we just consider the first two circles: our own passions, and some job qualifications (and perhaps related to that, actions we needed to take to get those qualifications). For a long time, this was how we approached our gardening and houseplants: we had the desire for a green household, but we didn’t have the qualifications (knowledge of plants, friendships with more experienced gardeners), nor the required actions (reading orchid care books or articles, consulting with garden shop employees) to ensure success. So the conditions for those orchids to survive were never going to happen.
But succulents? Succulents are the opposite: just stick in dirt, sprinkle our old coffee grounds on there because succulents like acidic soil, water to get them started, and just leave ‘em alone.
3-way Venn diagram: success and succulents (all three overlap)
With succulents, unlike orchids, we have a perfect overlap, and our compliment-earning reimagined front yard bears it out: plants that are a perfect match for our climate, time commitment, and knowledge. So again: if you’re thinking about career — or any other big time commitment, for that matter — don’t just think about your own passions, but consider the actions you’re willing to take, and the conditions around you as well. If you want to take action toward creating the scripted podcast idea you have a passion for, and build the conditions for a more creative life, our self-paced course is for you.
Here’s to finding your succulents.
