Araucaria

Gardeners of the world, take note: the araucaria plant shows up several times in Steppenwolf. It's just an ordinary houseplant that one of his neighbors has growing on the landing outside of her door, but for Harry it seems to have a special meaning.

One day the landlady's nephew finds him sitting there, meditating, and Harry tells him:

"Look at this little vestibule," Haller went on, "with the araucaria and its wonderful smell. Many a time I can't go by without pausing a moment. At your aunt's too, there reigns a wonderful smell of order and extreme cleanliness, but this little place of the araucaria, why, it's so shiningly clean, so dusted and polished and scoured, so inviolably clean that it positively glitters." (Preface, 29)

The plant's smell seems to mean a lot to Harry, because he associates it with cleanliness and home. Later on, though, he explains that that sort of orderly world is out of his reach:

"[…] I could not endure to live a single day in a house with araucarius. But though I am a shabby old Steppenwolf, still I'm the son of a mother, and my mother too was a middle-class man's wife and raised plants and took care to have her house and home as clean and neat and tidy as ever she could make it. All that is brought back to me by this breath of turpentine and by the araucaria, and so I sit down here every now and again […]" (Preface, 30)

Here we get the key to the meaning of the araucaria for Harry. It's a way for him to get back to his home and childhood, even though he is living in a way that his mother probably wouldn't be able to even recognize… or approve of. Even though he's kind of an old grouch, he still has ties to that safe feeling of home by sitting near the plant.

This shows us that Harry, even though he tries to boil himself down into either wolf or man, actually has many more aspects. He's been a child, he's lived in different kinds of homes, and those memories will be important for him both in the Magic Theater, and as he tries to embrace the philosophy of laughter.