Apr 26, 2024 4 min read

There’s this place on the internet called Reels, and it’s a time-sucking rabbit hole. I am not on Tiktok or Instagram or any of those platforms; instead I check in on Facebook occasionally and the Reels will pop up in my feed.

As with other social media, with Reels you can scroll through using only one finger and no brain cells and find endless short videos of people demonstrating things. Last week I happened upon a video of a woman showing how to keep house plants from dying. Being the keeper and sometimes killer of houseplants, I clicked and watched.

And that opened a portal of literally dozens and dozens of videos about houseplants: which ones clean the air, which ones need sunshine, which ones can be ignored and which ones are hardest to kill (answer: ZZ plant).

One of the videos showed the exposed roots of a philodendron, and how that will cause brown leaves and eventual death. That same thing was afflicting my own philodendron. I needed to fill in around the roots.

I put potting soil on my shopping list, but in the meantime, I thought of those poor, bare roots all naked and chilly, and remembered I have potting soil from last year. And so I took a bowl and a spoon out to the patio to raid the wooden planter box that grew my tomatoes last year, scooped some out and brought it back inside to fill in around the roots, watered it, and dusted off my hands as I walked away knowing I’d done something nice.

That was one p.m. on Tuesday. Wednesday morning at 10 I checked the plant and was creeped out to find a dozen little balls on stalks encircling the plant; picture brown lollipops on white sticks. I recoiled in horror. OK, that was hyperbole, but it was somewhat shocking to find.

How had these creatures gathered the energy, the motivation and the will to grow overnight – not only pushing a stem up through the dirt but also attaching a crunchy globe atop that stem? What the heck did I carry into the house?

“They are fungus or spores,” said my friend Gina, who grows an impressive garden of potted basil every summer.

“I figured,” I said, “but isn’t nature so weird.”

My first thought upon discovering the invaders wasn’t “poor philodendron,” but rather, did I breathe in a spore? I pinched the tops off all the lollipops, washed everything down the kitchen sink, poured Clorox down there to finish them off, then set the whole plant outside. Who knows what diabolical things will emerge? There have been horror movies made about such things.

I Googled “round spores in potting soil” and found lots of photos of little mushrooms and white furry mold, but nothing that looked like what I had. Generally, though, I learned that potting soil often is infected with fungus and spores, and it’s usually harmless.

I’m making the houseplant stay outside, like the time our boxer Winston got in a tangle with a skunk and was banned from the house for a while. Or the time the lilac blossoms I’d brought in erupted with little spiders. I love nature, but sometimes it just belongs outdoors. So far, I haven’t seen any more lollipops in the philodendron pot, nor have I seen a video that warns me about spore invaders.

When I look at that wooden planter where I got the soil, I imagine the whole, teeming world of spores, heating up as they prepare to emerge. I scooped the rest of the soil out of the planter into a bucket and tossed the lot over the back fence into the weeds. Far, far back.