What Your Plants Tell You When You Come Home From Holiday

Coming home from holiday always involves a quick inspection of what survived without you. The house can wait, the suitcase can definitely wait, but somehow the plants need checking almost immediately.

Some look exactly as you left them, one has produced three new leaves and appears to have enjoyed your absence enormously, while another has collapsed despite receiving exactly the same care.

Head outside and the situation gets even more insulting, because the plants you actually like may be looking decidedly tired while every weed has spent the past few weeks achieving its full potential.

There is something useful in all of this, though. Leaving your plants alone for a couple of weeks is an accidental stress test, and it can tell you quite a lot about what they really need.

We tend to develop routines around plants without necessarily questioning them, watering on certain days, moving them around, fussing over particular specimens and assuming the difficult ones simply require more attention. A holiday removes much of that intervention, and the results can be surprisingly revealing.

The Plant That Did Better Without You

If a houseplant has somehow doubled in size while you were away, resist the temptation to immediately reward it with a large drink. It may be telling you that you were watering it too often before you left.

Many common houseplants cope perfectly well with their soil drying between waterings, and permanently damp roots can cause far more trouble than a few thirsty days. Instead of returning automatically to your old routine, check the soil and let the plant dictate when it needs water.

Light can play a part too, particularly if you moved plants before leaving. Perhaps the one shifted away from a hot window suddenly looks much happier, or the plant you assumed needed plenty of direct sun actually preferred being farther back in the room.

Houses can also become considerably warmer when they are closed up during summer holidays, especially directly behind glass. Sometimes changing the position of a plant before you leave is more effective than creating an elaborate watering arrangement involving bottles, string and something you saw online at eleven o'clock the night before departure.

Before You Declare Anything Dead

A plant looking dreadful when you walk through the door isn't necessarily beyond saving. Brown or crispy leaves may be finished, but the roots and stems can still be perfectly viable.

Remove obviously dead material, check the soil and water thoroughly if it is genuinely dry, then give the plant a little time to recover. Pouring half a watering can into the pot every morning for the next week out of guilt is unlikely to improve matters.

It is also worth working out why it struggled before replacing it with exactly the same thing. A plant sitting in a very sunny position may simply have dried out too quickly, while something in a large pot might have retained enough moisture to cope perfectly well.

If one particular plant needs somebody to visit your house every second day just to keep it alive, you may decide you don't actually want that relationship. There are plenty of plants that are considerably less demanding housemates.

Your Garden Has Been Taking Notes Too

The garden tends to make the differences even more obvious. After a dry couple of weeks, certain plants can look remarkably healthy while others are hanging on by a thread. The survivors are worth paying attention to because they are showing you which plants genuinely suit your soil, aspect and local conditions.

If you are planning new borders or replacing plants in future, repeating varieties that already thrive without constant watering can gradually make the whole garden easier to manage.

Mulch can make a noticeable difference as well, particularly during hot, dry periods. It helps the soil retain moisture for longer and reduces the amount of bare ground exposed to the sun.

Grouping plants with similar watering requirements also makes life much easier, both normally and when somebody else is looking after the garden. Asking a neighbour to water everything every day is rather different from being able to point out the three pots that actually need attention.

And Then There Are The Weeds

Of course, the plants showing the greatest enthusiasm for your absence are quite often the ones you never planted. You can leave a garden looking reasonably respectable and return to weeds that appear to have completed an entire growing season while you were gone.

Annoying as that is, they can also tell you something about where there is exposed soil, where moisture collects and where your planting leaves enough room for opportunistic plants to move in. Dense planting and ground-cover plants can reduce some of that open territory without requiring you to spend every weekend pulling things out.

Take The Hint From What Survived

Coming home from holiday is a surprisingly good time to look at your plants with fresh eyes. The ones that survived easily are probably worth having more of, while the ones that repeatedly need rescuing may simply be wrong for that particular spot.

The same applies indoors. A few weeks away can tell you more about what your plants actually need than months of faithfully following the same watering routine.

Perhaps that is the useful bit to take from the casualties. Instead of immediately replacing everything that died, look at what thrived and work from there. A home and garden filled with plants that suit the conditions you actually have will always be easier to live with than one that needs constant intervention.

And if the only thing that truly flourished while you were away was bindweed, you are entirely entitled to ignore that particular piece of feedback.