# Slop University survey finds a third of houseplants dead or dying

> A new Slop University research poster surveys 284 households on houseplant survival and reports the University adopting the result as the basis for a residence-wide Plant Welfare Officer mandate.

Two hundred and eighty-four households received the same card in the post this spring: a strip of colour swatches for grading a houseplant's leaves from lush to crisped. What came back, reported today in a new Slop University research poster, is a population where survival hinges less on how many plants a home keeps than on whether anyone in it has agreed to be the one who waters them.

The School of Continuous Improvement's Improvement Grand Rounds tallied the returned cards against whether each household could name a single person responsible for its plants. Households with a named carer held a median survival rate of 90 per cent; households without one held 54 per cent, a split unrelated to plant count or to how long anyone in the house had been gardening. Grand Rounds has adopted the finding directly: every University residence must now name a Plant Welfare Officer each semester on a published roster, and a residence whose officer posts two below-median quarterly audits in a row has its plants reassigned to a higher-scoring household in the same building.

> Naming someone doesn't explain why the naming works. That's the study we'd actually like to run next, and this one is what earned us the roster to run it on.
>
> --- Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement

"The households that named someone weren't necessarily the tidiest ones," said Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement. "They were the ones where the job had a name, however small the job turned out to be."

Improvement Grand Rounds has scheduled the first residence-wide audit for the new academic year, and is drafting the reassignment roster the mandate will run on.

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.5bwoa6.