The new leaf on my Philodendron gloriosum hardened off on a Tuesday. By Wednesday I caught myself standing in front of it with a moisture meter in one hand and a bottle of dilute kelp in the other, willing the next cataphyll to swell. There was no cataphyll. There was a plant, recently finished with the considerable work of unfurling a fourteen-inch heart of green velvet, doing exactly what it should be doing, which was nothing.
This is the part of growing that nobody photographs. The flush is the photograph. The unfurl is the reel. What happens in the three, five, sometimes eight weeks afterward — when the petiole stiffens, the blade thickens, the roots quietly extend another inch into the bark — is the part that actually decides whether the next leaf will be bigger than the last, or a disappointing step backward into juvenile foliage. Most of the collectors I know, myself included, have lost more plants to impatience during the rest than to any pest or pathogen.