Edinburgh Opens A&E for Overwatered Ferns

In Edinburgh, an ailing houseplant can be put on a drip, quarantined or taken into “surgery” — an impressively serious medical response for a patient that spends the entire consultation sitting silently in a pot.

The service is Hilda Houseplant Hospital, run by horticulturist Rosanna Costello in the Scottish capital. Its work, reported on July 11, is intended for people who lack a green thumb but remain fond of the greenery they have accidentally brought to the brink.

Costello came up with the idea after visiting plant shops and wishing she had been given more guidance on caring for her own plants. Now, when customers bring their poorly specimens to the hospital, she works up a “patient history” and talks through possible diagnoses and treatments with the owner.

Depending on the problem, a plant may be isolated in quarantine, placed on a drip or booked in for “surgery”. Happily, surgery in this particular hospital is generally less alarming than it sounds. It usually involves practical horticultural work such as repotting the plant or removing pests, with no anxious relatives required to wait beside a vending machine.

The recuperation process is thorough. “Once they’ve been repotted and trimmed, we feed them, give them a really good cleaning, and let the customer know they’re ready to collect,” Costello said.

That final phone call can carry rather more emotional weight than an outsider might expect. Houseplants may not fetch slippers or greet anyone at the door, but Costello has found that their owners often care deeply about them. “There’s an awful lot of feelings and emotions attached to the houseplants that we see, and when they come to collect and get care information, there’s so much relief and joy,” she said.

The treatment therefore ends not only with a cleaner, fed and freshly trimmed plant, but with its owner receiving information about how to look after it once it goes home. Hilda Houseplant Hospital continues to offer Edinburgh’s struggling indoor foliage a route from quarantine or the operating pot back to the windowsill — and gives worried owners the welcome news that their leafy patient is ready for collection.