Animals & Plants

Animals and plants can be surprisingly difficult to coordinate. I’m not a big green-thumb, but I do like live plants (plastic just don't do it for me). Having had difficult plant situations in the past, my inclination was to look for plants claimed to be easy to grow, or hard to kill. I was also intrigued by plants claimed to be effective at filtering or cleaning air. Or even just browse a local store and see what plants look nice and seem to have light needs I can accommodate. Can’t do that though. Not without first searching several databases to see if the plants are toxic to animals. You can try to plant or keep them out of the way of your animal, but with my determined cats, I can't be too sure. Why ask for trouble? So I end up copy/pasting articles about good plants into a word document just so I can track the recommendations and then check them against the toxic lists. Unfortunately in my quest, the large majority of them are toxic. And don't even think about browsing the plant stores unless you have a mobile device to look up the toxicity. It’s just ironic. About a year ago I tried to find those easy to grow plants for work because my co-workers shut all the window blinds and my plants died. Not even thinking about toxicity, I had a difficult time finding the commonly recommended plants to buy. Good grief. Now we have a new place with lots of sun, I thought it would be nice to have plants at home, and actually found a couple of those hearty plants. But alas, they're toxic to animals. Just had no idea this could be so complicated.