Care in human-houseplant relationships

This Master’s thesis research explores how care produces relations of human-houseplant relationships. The theoretical framework of the thesis builds on the methodology of feminist new materialisms and multispecies studies. Following the actor network theory and Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species, humans and nonhumans are defined as agents and companion species that form in co-creation and are dependent on each other, because they consist of situated webs of relations. Therefore, regarding the subject of the thesis, both houseplants and humans are agents that are part of each other’s web of companion species. The theoretical framework for care is built on María Puig de la Bellacasa’s three-dimensional care: labour/work, affect/affections and ethics/politics. Care is comprehended to be embedded in the relations of humans and houseplants as multilateral, asymmetric actions of care, which are necessary for the houseplants to subsist. The research data consists of semi-structured thematic interviews of six Finnish houseplant carers. Most of the interviews were conducted at the interviewees’ homes during the first months of the year 2019. Abductive content analysis was employed to analyse the data and examine how the three dimensions of care, doing care, affect and ethics, produced and emerged from the relations of human-houseplant relationships. The analysis indicates that hands-on caring for houseplants enables humans to learn to know and interpret the needs of their houseplants. Each plant and human carer together with the human carer’s rhythm of care and the indoor environment of their home produce the relationship. Human relations and community are also part of the human-houseplant relationships as memories and attachment, and by either supporting or complicating hands-on caring for the plants. The interviewees often wanted to have houseplants that were good looking and easy to care, because they wanted to succeed in caring for the plants and did not want to lose them. Caring for houseplants involves ethical negotiations of good care and obligation to care to which human carer can respond with affective care. Positive and negative affective responses are also part of the care and either encourage or discourage human carer to continue care for their plants. Furthermore, challenges in caring for houseplants could create cuts and reorder the relations of humans and houseplants by both ending existing relations and creating new ones. Hence caring for houseplants involves collaboration, negotiation, competition and challenge. These tensions and collaborations reveal the becoming with of humans and houseplants together with each other and the other nonhumans of their webs of relations