js_thrill | I am not really a plant person!

When I moved into my house (in 2016?), I was given a money tree as a housewarming gift:

a tall tree in a plain red pot on a wooden table in a somewhat messy room

It is possible that I have never taken care of a plant before? But a money tree is relatively easy to take care of. The directions on the card that came with it said to put two ice cubes in with it once a week. I would periodically rotate it, and I had tried a few different locations for it, so that I could get a sense of how much light/how direct of light it needed. At a certain point, the pot it was in seemed insufficient, so I went to home depot and bought the next size up and some potting soil and re-potted it. Eventually, it seemed to be getting too big for that pot (the one pictured above). I thought about going to Home Depot again, but remembered that my friend Alexis makes pottery. So I asked her if she takes requests.

Alexis was very gracious and said she would be happy to take this on! She said she'd be enjoying putting text on her pottery, and asked if I had any text I'd want on the pot. I'd been thinking a lot about trees lately, because there are a number of places in philosophy where trees turn up as pivotal examples. When discussing identity over time, John Locke talks about a sapling growing into a huge oak, and being different matter, but remaining the same tree the whole time. George Berkeley says he will rest his whole case for his philosophical system on the question of whether it is possible for his opponent to imagine a tree that is not even so much as being thought of by anyone at all in the universe. Margaret Cavendish wrote a poem in which a man has a conversation with the tree he is chopping down, trying to convince it that it would be great to be turned into a boat or the walls of a castle, and the tree is not having it. Zhuangzi has a somewhat recurring motif of a useless tree. Here is the relevant part of the Zhuangzi, it involves a master Carpenter and his apprentice, and a giant tree. This translation is by Brook Ziporyn. You can see a different version of the translation here by Burton Watson, if you like:

Carpenter Stoney was traveling in Qi when he came upon the tree of the shrine at the Qu Yuan bend. It was over a hundred arm spans around, so large that thousands of oxen could shade themselves beneath it. It overstretched the surrounding hills, its lowest branches hundreds of feet from the ground, at least a dozen of which could have been hollowed out to make into ships. It was surrounded by marveling sightseers, but the carpenter walked past it without a second look.

When his apprentice finally got tired of admiring it, he caught up with Carpenter Stoney and said, “Since taking up my axe to follow you, Master, I have never seen a tree of such fine material as this! And yet you don’t even deign to look twice at it or pause beneath it. Why?”

Carpenter Stoney said, “Stop! Say no more! This is worthless lumber! As a ship it would soon sink, as a coffin it would soon rot, as a tool it would soon break, as a door it would leak sap, as a pillar it would bring infestation. This is a talentless, worthless tree. It is precisely because it is so useless that it has lived so long.”

Back home that night, the tree appeared to Carpenter Stoney in a dream. It said to him, “What do you want to compare me to, one of those cultivated trees? The hawthorn, the pear, the orange, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs—when their fruit is ripe they get plucked, and that is an insult. Their large branches are bent, their small branches are pruned. Thus do their abilities embitter their lives. That is why they die young, failing to fully live out their Heaven-given lifespans. They batter themselves with the vulgar conventions of the world, as do all the other things of the world. As for me, I’ve been working on being useless for a long time. It almost killed me, but I’ve finally managed it—and it is of great use to me! If I were useful, do you think I could have grown to be so great?

“Moreover, you and I are both things, objects—how then should we objectify each other? We are members of the same class, namely, things—is either of us in a position to classify and evaluate the other? How could a worthless man with one foot in the grave know what is or isn’t a worthless tree?”

Carpenter Stoney awoke and told his dream to his apprentice. The apprentice said, “If it’s trying to be useless, what’s it doing with a shrine around it?” Carpenter Stoney said, “Hush! Don’t talk like that! Those people came to it for refuge on their own initiative. In fact, the tree considers it a great disgrace to be surrounded by this uncomprehending crowd. If they hadn’t made it a shrine, they could easily have gone the other way and started carving away at it. What it protects, what protects it, is not this crowd, but something totally different. To praise it for fulfilling its responsibility in the role it happens to play—that would really be missing the point!”

I started to write a lot of stuff about uselessness in the Zhuangzi, but that seems like a post for another time. I basically told Alexis to use any part of that passage that spoke to her, in particular the carpenter's dream.

Yesterday, a package arrived from Alexis, with my new plant pot in it!

I had no idea what lines she had chosen or anything at all about the pot, until I opened the package.

the older plain red pot next to alexis's beautiful new pot, which is multi-colored earth tones

As you can see this is a very nice upsize for my tree's home. Here are some close ups of the new pot with text visible:

the pot sitting on the brown table, text reading "they batter themselves with the vulgar conventions of the world"

the pot sitting on the brown table, text reading "if i were useful, do you think i could have grown so great?"

I was extremely moved by this. I found myself crying when it arrived, and after I had repotted it. I'm going to spend some time unpacking that at some point, but mostly right now, I want to share the artistry/craftwork with others. Here are some pictures of the tree, in its new home: