It Came from Home Depot

In 2010, I bought a jade plant at the Home Depot on 23rd Street in Manhattan.

Six-inch plastic pot, $8.99, maybe less. I was the creative director at O, The Oprah Magazine and living alone in a studio on the Upper West Side while my family waited out the school year back home. 

The apartment was in one of those new (at the time) Trump buildings facing the Hudson River and near Lincoln Center — his name in gold letters on the façades of all of them — back when he was just a tabloid punchline and not a national emergency. The place had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson and the Palisades beyond, which sounds romantic until you’re eating Whole Foods hot bar takeout completely alone at 9pm watching the lights twinkling in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The jade was meant to make the place feel less temporary. A living thing. Something to keep alive besides myself.

Fifteen years later, that plant is over three feet tall with a trunk as thick as my forearm. It has outlasted that job (and a few others), that apartment, that version of my life. It has outlasted three presidencies and a pandemic. More importantly, it has spawned a diaspora. I’ve shared cuttings with friends across the country — a whole biblical lineage of jade plants, begetting and begetting and begetting. Little pieces of 2010 living in Boston and Austin and Rochester and God-knows-where else.

For most of those years my jade just grew. That’s what jades do if you don’t kill them, and they’re nearly indestructible, which makes it a perfect plant for someone chasing success at the expense of nearly everything else. I watered it when I remembered. It grew anyway. 

Eventually back in New England now, it got so big and heavy I stopped moving it, and it languished in my office in a dark corner, its branches stretching and sagging under their own weight. Still alive, still growing, but in that grim houseplant way — surviving without thriving, taking up space without purpose.

•••

I’m a graphic designer. I’ve spent my entire career making things for other people — solving problems, serving clients, chasing deadlines and approvals. Good work, work I’m proud of, but always in service of something else. Someone else’s vision, someone else’s brand, someone else’s bottom line.

I wanted to keep the jade. It deserved a future. But its days as a houseplant were ending. It needed a dramatic rebirth. (We both did). I decided to somehow make it into something with a future: art. My art. Living art that would never be finished, never be delivered to a client, never exist for any purpose other than its own becoming.

So I cut all the branches off.

Every single one. I took it down to that massive trunk and a few stubs. It was late July, brutally hot, and I’d already been playing around with a couple of other plants — testing the waters, wondering if this might be bonsai or just a passing curiosity. But this jade was different. This was the tree that had been with me through so much.

Cutting it back wasn’t about saving a dying plant. This tree was a symbol of those years. A reminder. It was about refusing to let something I’d cared for become something I merely maintained. It was about making a promise — to the tree, to myself, to this practice I was circling around but that hadn’t fully made itself clear. 

It was about finally making something that would never be finished, that I would tend for the rest of my life not because someone was paying me or expecting deliverables, but because that’s what the work is. The work is the tending.

If I could do this — take something I’d kept alive for fifteen years and radically reshape it into something intentional, something beautiful, something mine — then I was onto something. This wasn’t some hobby I was trying on. This was a commitment.

•••

The gamble paid off. Within weeks — several very uncomfortable weeks fearing I’d killed it — tiny green buds started appearing where branches used to be. Then leaves. Then new growth pushing out in directions I could choose, not just wherever gravity and neglect dictated. The jade didn’t just survive the chop. It flourished.

And watching that happen — watching this old, patient tree respond to intention instead of indifference — something clicked.

I can do this. I will do this. I want this!

That was a year ago. It’s summer now, my first full year of practicing deliberately, and I’m ready. The jade taught me that you can take something you’ve so poorly nurtured and actually give it a full life. That care and survival aren’t the same thing. That sometimes the most loving thing you can do is cut everything back and start over. That art doesn’t have to end to be art. That maybe the best art never does.

Now I’ll try to learn what comes after.