Keeping plants indoors

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

I bought my first houseplants after seeing photographs of rooms that looked calm because every corner contained a leaf. Mine arrived with small care cards, which I read as guarantees. Within a month, one plant had yellowed and another leaned towards the window as though attempting to leave. The room had not acquired effortless calm. It had acquired dependants.

I learned to check the soil instead of watering on a rigid schedule and moved plants according to light rather than how they balanced a shelf. Caring for them became satisfying once I stopped treating them as decoration that happened to be alive. I still enjoy how they look. But their value now includes the small attention they require and the fact that the room cannot be arranged entirely according to my taste. A living thing is an awkward accessory, and a more interesting companion.

Source B: an original letter in a nineteenth-century voice. This is a period-voice simulation, not an archival document.

Dear Maria, your description of the many plants filling your sitting room is delightful, though I hope enthusiasm has left space for the people who must inhabit it. I have reduced my own collection to those I can keep in good condition. There is little kindness in crowding a window with specimens that each receive too little light, merely to announce one's devotion to growing things.

A few healthy plants give me more pleasure than a large assembly maintained in continual distress. I attend to them each morning and enjoy their changes, but I will not convert every free hour into a campaign against unsuitable conditions. The house must serve its human residents as well. This is not a plea for bare rooms. It is a plea for proportion: choose what can thrive where it is placed, and let affection be measured by care rather than quantity. The finest collection may be the one that knows when to stop collecting.

Refer to the whole of both sources. Compare the writers’ perspectives on caring for houseplants and how they convey those perspectives. Support your comparison with evidence from both sources.