As fiddle leaf figs were blowing up the lifestyle and home design internet a few years ago, I walked into a big box home improvement store one frigid night in February and saw fig plants sitting there in the houseplant section. They were just $10 for a decent-sized plant. I put two in my cart.

I’ve always loved plants and gardening, but I always felt my plants survived in spite of me, not because of me. It wasn’t for lack of good intentions.

I remember as a teenager splinting one of my mom’s houseplants whose stem had been broken. If I remember correctly, it lived, and I continued nursing my plants long before I realized I also wanted to be a medical nurse.

I’ve kept my houseplants limited to just a few varieties. I have a 20+ year old ficus, several spider plants, a little tropical tree I found at Ikea, and now, some fiddle leaf figs.

The two figs I chose on that cold night – and by cold, I mean single digits – I wrapped by placing a plastic shopping bag on each one of the big leaves. It was an interesting walk to the car in the frigid, windy night with bags blowing off the plants and me frantically trying to put them back on. I was feeling bad for the plants, guilty for spending the money, and terrible about all the plastic bags I was wasting. I’ve always been a sucker for a self-flaggelation opportunity.

I was sure by the time I got home that the leaves would have been hopelessly burned by the icy weather.

They weren’t. In fact, in the couple of years since that night, both figs have doubled in height. One of them looks like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree, but it keeps growing new leaves, so I’m hoping it will fill out eventually. I picked up some rooting hormone so that I can clip some of its leaves and start new plants to put in the soil by its scrawny trunk to help fill things out. I’ll just do that, you know, in my free time.

I picked up a third fig and brought it home to join the others, who live out on the back patio in the warmer months, basking in the indirect sunlight and rainfall. I was surprised by how short it looked next to its kin.

It was a realization that you don’t have to be amazing to keep houseplants alive, and also, putting them out to pasture for the summer is a good idea. Summer time is when my spider plants send off baby shoots, and when my ficus and figs leaf out enthusiastically with new growth.

It’s that time again, time to put your houseplants out. If you haven’t tried it before and you have a little spot by the house that doesn’t get blazed by the summer sun, give it a try.

If you do, let me know what happens.

Happy Memorial Day.