I Love my Plants to Death

I feel bad for my houseplants. Most of them aren't really houseplants at all but rather tender perennials from the yard-those I could not bear to part with. In fact the only plants that look healthy are those that really are houseplants. There are exactly 6 of them. The other 24 of them look positively pathetic. I don't have an extremely sunny window anywhere on the south side of the house. The two south facing windows are crowded with plants large and small all reaching in unison in a graceful arc towards the sun. They look depressed but I'm not sure if it's the fact that the current death toll is 11 or if they miss the feeling of the sun on their leaves like I do. This morning I added the 11th pot to the growing pile in the garage representative of my failings as a plant parent. My Dracaena finally croaked despite my efforts to keep it alive. Yes. I managed to kill a Dracaena. Shocking isn't it? Even more shocking is the tale of that little plant's life. That 'spike plant' was planted as a centerpiece in a color pot in the summer of 2007. At the end of the season I dumped all of my annual color pots in the compost pile. In the spring the compost pile was turned and the Dracaena tumbled out and landed on the ground, rooted, and tripled in size over the course of the summer. (Note: tropical plant. grows in places like Florida.) It was not watered. It was never properly planted. It just survived there next to the compost pile all summer. At the end of the summer I determined the Dracaena should be properly potted, brought inside, and adored for the entirety of the winter. I feel awful. Perhaps I should have just tossed it back in the compost pile. Apparently my adoration was a harsher sentence than the frigid winter.