Gardening through grief: What I learned when I lost my mom and gained her houseplants [column] | Home & Garden

There is a season for everything, a time for every occupation under heaven: A time for giving birth, a time for dying; a time for planting, a time for uprooting what has been planted. …I know there is no happiness for a human being except in pleasure and enjoyment through life. And when we eat and drink and find happiness in all our achievements, this is a gift from God.

Ecclesiastes, 3:1-2, 12-13

To everything there is a season, and this season of my life has been marked with tremendous grief and pain.

In the past eight months, I’ve lost my mother, her brother, my niece, a co-worker for whom I have the utmost respect. A few months before that, my cat ran away and hasn’t been seen since. My oldest daughter graduates next week, and although our company experienced a rebirth into a nonprofit community news organization, we’ve been without a dedicated office space since October.

A time for giving birth, a time for dying; a time for planting, a time for uprooting what has been planted. …

I’m someone who measures their value by their achievements, but in this season, defining achievement has changed. And so I’m tending plants, gardening through grief.

My last few gardening columns have offered helpful tips on propagation or a look at some cool plants I got at Farm Show (btw, they’re all doing great).

I’m no expert on grief and mourning. I really don’t want to offer “tips.” So, how about a few things I’ve learned along the way?

This mystery plant (perhaps a variety of the snake?) was sitting neglected in a window box, roots rotting in stale water, after my mother passed away and before I rescued it from my father. I cleaned the roots with peroxide, let it sit in (frequently changed, clean) water for a few months and then planted. 

STEPHANIE ZEIGLER | DIRECTOR OF JOURNALISM

1 – Tending plants isn’t for everyone.

Especially my dad. (I’d say sorry, but he’s doing his best and knows it.) My mother’s rooms were full of plants – found, propagated, gifted, inherited, whatever. So were my grandmother’s, so when my Gram died in 2001, my mother took her plants. My mother’s gardens outside were curated from local greenhouses and roadsides. She and my father would cruise the backroads of the Poconos, where I grew up, with a shovel and a few 5-gallon buckets, digging up whatever she identified and wanted to add to their acre and a half. She had a green life, not a green thumb.

As my mother’s body deteriorated and her mobility ended, my father became the caretaker of her plants.

“I think there were 300 and I’ve got them down to about 30 now,” he said when she died in October, two days after her 76th birthday and a day before my 46th.

I’d watched, as they’d browned and broken. So a few weeks later, I missed my mom and wanted to be near my dad, so I drove on up and rescued a trunkful of plants that needed to be repotted or rehabilitated, including a few that I think had been sitting in the same red solo cup on a windowsill for roughly 10 years. (“I just dump a little water in once a week,” he told me while I squawked at him about fresh water and root rot.) Dad tends the remaining 20 or so on Sundays, a continued labor of love for the woman he still goes to see every day.

My father and my husband are both best left to tend inanimate objects – cars, houses, infrastructure systems, machines. They should for sure stick to their blueprints and measurements, because I sure won’t – and I’ll tend the living.

Two small tradescantia shoots inside this pot are all that’s left of a plant that had been living in 101NQ and given up for dead.

STEPHANIE ZEIGLER | DIRECTOR OF JOURNALISM

2 – What starts as avoidance can turn into acceptance.

I felt lost and sinking in a few ways in October. One, as I explained above, was in losing my mother. The other was in helping my colleagues clean out our offices at 101NQ, which included opening up some boxes that had been packed at 8 W King in 2020 and stashed under desks in what never actually became our permanent home. As we did, we mourned our old home a few blocks away but even more so the BeforeTimes – the camaraderie we’d had with everyone in-office full-time before March 2020. Some boxes were time capsules of print production tools, previous incarnations of Lancaster newspapers, phone lists and floor plans for reporters who’d moved or retired, left or been lost. Reminders of the chaos of 2020 and “hybrid” work since were being packed up to go … somewhere. (I’ve got a lot of boxes for L-L Media Days in my basement, as well as photographer Chris Knight’s basketball hoop now.)

I couldn’t make that better for the people I work with, whom I really care about. I couldn’t really do anything tangible, so I took some plants home – a Tradescantia that Dan Nephin had scorched, an aloe that was soggy in its pot, a spider plant that had produced hundreds of offspring but was in sad shape. That spider plant has about 20 offspring living around my house, plus a dozen more I’d given away. The aloe and the wanderer have recovered. Mama, as I’ve come to call her, though, is having a struggle and might need another repot.

The newsroom’s massive spider plant – Mama, as I call her – has created at least two dozen existing offspring in my house alone. But she’s been struggling even before I brought her home. Now, she’s got some new green life, and I hope to chop off some dead roots and repot her soon.

STEPHANIE ZEIGLER | DIRECTOR OF JOURNALISM

I took them home to avoid the feeling of helplessness, as if to care for those plants meant I could care for people who, now without their work home, also might have felt like they’d been wandering the desert.

This aloe plant was suffering root rot in a small pot when I rescued it from 101NQ in October 2025. Now, its leaves have lost their yellow and the plant has recovered enough to have several pups in a bigger pot.

STEPHANIE ZEIGLER | DIRECTOR OF JOURNALISM

I rescued those plants from my dad for the same reason, to avoid feeling helpless.

The plants gave me purpose, staved off depression, gave me reasons to get out of bed and move to a different room to work, because the plants, at least, would be counting on me. Gradually, I looked forward to their care. And as for work, and my family, we all do our best to adjust to the next season, to find meaning, to find hope. It helps to keep your hands busy while you’re working on acceptance.

This plant – is it a palm? I call it a palm – belonged to my mother and was the first plant my father asked me to take after her death. But I recently let it sit too long in direct light on my porch and scorched its leaves. 

STEPHANIE ZEIGLER | DIRECTOR OF JOURNALISM

3 – Failure isn’t real when it comes to plants.

The first of my mother’s plants was a palm sitting in the dining room, that my dad had asked me or my cousin to take. I was happy to. She’s been doing great, with new leaves unfurling and her leaves glossy.

But then I moved her outside right before our last heat wave, underestimated the strength of the sun, and scorched her leaves. Then I set her aside and avoided looking at her for a few days, because I was so sad. I’d been trusted with her by my dad, and I scorched her. It felt like failure.

I could hear my mom clucking at me to get over myself, go cut the *insert colorful adjective here* leaves off and let it grow back. So just before I started writing, that’s exactly what I did.

You can overthink your plants, or not think about them enough, but there are only ever two outcomes – they live or they die. Now, within those? If they live, there are only ever two answers and one question to everything. Does it need more light, yes or no? OK, then move it or don’t. Does it need water? Does it need a bigger pot? It’s oddly simple. And if it dies? Well, that’s that. Maybe you were able to save a piece to continue caring for.

Just start with what it needs, and go from there. Do your best, and this season, too, shall pass. Ever forward.

Stephanie Zeigler is director of journalism at LNP | LancasterOnline. She’s become obsessed with houseplants as a positive and creative outlet.