The other day I took a walk through the Vanier Pavilion with some friends. Very soon the building is going to undergo a major renovation and it is going to be almost completely gutted and renewed. So that means that the building has to be completely emptied of its contents. And so when I was touring the building and beginning to make a preliminary assessment of the remaining contents, I was a little shocked to see that there was still a plant left in the building.
Now this is going to be a tad dramatic but when I saw the plant from the other side of the locked door I immediately lunged for it. The door was of course locked and I ended up looking kind of foolish. Whatever, at the very least it really upped my greed cred. And then 2 days later I went back and got the plant (things tend to work better when you bring the right set of keys).
So this isn’t the first time that either myself or Brigitte has saved plants from abandonment. Vanier is the second building that is going to be revamped or demolished this year, and even though I could go on and on about what the stuff that gets left inside buildings (I will save that for another post), I want to focus on plants. I find it strange that people would abandon a plant. I mean it is a living thing and given the size of some of these plants, there was a lot of time and attention that was put into it.
So why am I all worked up about these plants? Well I have been playing around with the idea of flooding the campus with more indoor plants for a couple of years now. I mean there are a lot of reasons why we should all have more indoor plants. They improve air quality, they improve moral, they are aesthetically pleasing, and they help us to reconnect (albeit in a small way) to the natural world for which we are so lacking. But mostly for me, I just think they look really cool.
An appropriate metric would be the number of indoor plants per employee. I think fixing a number of three to five plants per employee would be ideal. Having a program in place to give new employees some plants would be a nice idea. There are of course logistical problems but I think that the benefits outweigh the costs. The plants could be used as a means to make the office space more personal. When employees go on vacation they will have to depend on their office mates to take care of their plants, creating a stronger sense of community.
Other plants saved in the past month >>
