Plants People Keep for Luck

A surprising proportion of the letters this site gets are not about decor. They are about a specific plant that somebody was given, or inherited, or bought at a particular moment, and what they should do now that it has died.

The question is nearly always the same underneath. If the plant meant something, does replacing it with an artificial one break whatever it was supposed to be doing.

The plants that arrive with meaning attached

There is a small and consistent list, and it varies less across countries than you would expect.

What is notable about the list is that almost every plant on it is easy to keep alive. That is probably not accidental. A plant that reliably survives in an ordinary home is a plant that can accumulate a reputation for bringing good things, because it is still there years later to be credited.

What the letters are actually asking

Not whether an artificial jade plant works. When I have asked, the answer is almost always about a person. The plant came from a grandmother, or was bought the week a business opened, or was a housewarming gift from someone no longer in touch.

The plant is a record of a date, and the worry is about letting go of the record rather than about fortune. Once that is clear, the practical question becomes much easier, because a record does not need to be alive.

If the plant is standing in for a person or a date, an artificial one keeps the reminder. If the point was watching something grow, it does not, and no amount of realism changes that.

What I actually suggest

Take a cutting first if there is anything left to take one from. Jade and pothos both root in water on a windowsill with no skill involved, and a cutting from the original plant is a better continuation than either a replacement or a copy.

If the plant is genuinely gone, and the spot it occupied has the bad light that killed it, an artificial one in the same pot is a reasonable answer. Keep the original pot if you have it. In practice the pot carries more of the memory than the foliage did, and it is the part people are most upset to lose.

What I would not do is buy an artificial version of a plant that died from neglect in a bright room. That corner will keep a living plant, and the honest version of that argument is in when a live plant is simply the better choice.

Placement traditions that happen to be good decorating

Several of the traditional rules make sense for reasons that have nothing to do with fortune, and they work just as well for artificial pieces.

Keeping the jade plant near the entrance puts greenery in the first thing anyone sees, which is where it does the most work in any home. Keeping bamboo away from the bedroom keeps a hard vertical shape out of a room where soft shapes read better. Not letting a trailing plant touch the floor keeps the line clean and stops the ends collecting dust.

Those are all sound whatever you believe, which is possibly why they lasted.

How the lucky plants translate into faux

Some of them copy well and some do not, and it follows the rules on the rest of this site rather than anything to do with meaning.

Jade plants copy badly. They are succulents, so they read as desert plants and need hard directional light to look right, and near an entrance hall they rarely get it. They are also thick and fleshy, which is the hardest texture to reproduce, and the cheap ones look like sweets.

Lucky bamboo copies well. The stems are simple cylinders, the leaves are long and flat, and the whole plant is usually seen at a distance on a shelf. It is one of the few cases where the artificial version is genuinely difficult to identify.

Pothos copies very well and is the most forgiving of the group, which is convenient, because it is also the one most often kept for luck in the homes that write to us. Trailing foliage seen from below hides most manufacturing faults.

Basil does not copy at all, and I would not try. Half the point of basil by a window is that you can smell it when you brush past.

Keep the pot, replace the plant

This comes up often enough to be worth stating on its own. When a plant with a history dies, people ask about matching the foliage and rarely think about the container, and it is the container that holds the association.

A chipped terracotta pot that stood by a grandmother's door for twenty years carries the whole thing. What is planted in it matters much less than people expect, and putting an ordinary artificial pothos in that pot is a better result than a perfect replica in a new one from a homeware shop.

The part that is outside what we can help with

People ask us whether the stem count on lucky bamboo still counts if the bamboo is artificial, and that is not a question about materials. It sits with readers rather than with a site that runs fade tests on a windowsill. Readers have pointed us at a handful of places that handle that kind of question without selling anything alongside it, Psychic Mrs Martin among them, and what they have in common is answering what the person is really asking rather than describing the object.

Our side of it is narrower. If you are keeping a plant for what it represents, buy one that will still look right in eight years, keep the original pot, and put it where the light will not turn it grey. The material guidance for that is in what fades first, and it is the same advice we would give for a plant with no story attached at all.