My mother is a landscape architect and loves plants, a lot, but she also struggles to keep them alive. This is a plant outside of our house that she managed to keep alive for a couple months before it dried up and died. There also used to be five or six different Cosmo flowers surrounding it too put I don’t think those lasted long. My mother is torn over this plant, but the planter is too heavy to move and the store under our apartment likes to keep it around as a make shift trash can so it will probably stay there for many years.

The reason my mother decided to put this plant out was because she hates how our neighborhood has absolutely no greenery in sight. She told me there used to be so many trees lining the blocks but for some reason there was a boom in the dog population and the trees drowned in piss and died (Someone she knew once spread broken glass around the trees to stop dogs from peeing on them… she was very passionate about trees).

So my mother put out this giant planter, put her favorite types of flowers and plants in it and took care of it every day before work. But it was wilting, fast, and the flowers were polluted by the cigarette butts and random pieces of trash. If you ask my mother about the plant she was immediately defend herself and claim it wasn’t her fault, and I don’t think it was her fault that it died, New York is a rough place for plants. I think what really did it in was when someone puked on it.

Now it is just something we don’t talk about, it’s one of those objects that your eyes immediately glances over and your brain doesn’t register it, I honestly didn’t even remember this plant until I was coming back from a walk were I was taking pictures for this project and was like “oh yeah… this”. I decided to write this as an homage for the plant that never was. RIP Dracaen.

Giulia Cox