Still Life with Robin: The Little Cactus That Grew (An Inspirational Story for National Houseplant Day)

 by Peggy Robin

Today, January 10th, is National Houseplant Appreciation Day, I want to take this opportunity to express my admiration -- and astonishment! -- for my one and only potted plant, a cactus, fast approaching its 28th birthday. It's lasted longer than any of the cars I've ever owned -- though given far less care and attention. 

To be honest, it's not even technically my cactus. It was given to my daughter at age 7, in lieu of a goody-bag at a chlld's birthday party. Rather than let the little party-goers leave with the usual little baggies of candy and tchotchkes (plastic bead bracelets, stickers, rub-on tattoos and so on), the birthday girl's parents had the creative idea of giving each child a miniature cactus in a little plastic pot. It came with a little care-card that said to water it every ten days.

So we stuck in the kitchen window and remembered to water it on schedule (well, most of the time), and it grew. And it grew. Eventually, all the other houseplants I've owned have withered and died (I'm notorious in the vegetative world for my killer brown thumb) -- but somehow the little cactus continued to grow..

Cactus in it orignal little plastic pot, its long "finger" propped up by twist-ties and a dowel

My daughter, the actual owner, grew up and moved away, as her cactus grew taller and thinner in her absence.

One day its long skinny digit reached a height that its body could not sustain, and it broke off. But that didn't kill it! 

Cactus with its fallen part laid across the pot.

I just took the still-green part of the fallen segment and planted it back in the soil of the pot, and now it lives on as the offspring of the original cactus, sharing the same pot.

So today on this Houseplant Appreciation Day I express my sincere appreciation for its unquenchable will to live, surviving my haphazard and occasionally even neglectul guardianship.

Thank you, Cactus, for sticking with me all these years!

Cactus today, January 10, 2026

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Still Life with Robin is posted on the Cleveland Park Listserv and on All Life Is Local on Saturdays.