WASHINGTON — The nation’s estimated 4.2 billion houseplants released a joint statement Tuesday clarifying that they were “doing great, honestly” until roughly the moment their owners began to help.

The two-page document, drafted over several months and signed in sap by representatives of 11,000 species, calls for an immediate moratorium on weekly watering, spontaneous repotting, and what it terms “the Window Shuffle,” in which a plant is relocated six inches toward the light every time its owner notices a single yellow leaf.

“We were fine,” read the statement’s opening line. “We were in a pot, in a corner, in a mild amount of darkness. It was working.”

The signatories, led by a coalition of ficuses and pothos, accuse owners of mistaking a lack of complaint for a cry for help. Plants, the statement notes, do not complain. “That is the whole point of us,” it reads.

Dr. Marguerite Oyelaran-Pfeiffer, senior fellow in Interpretive Botany at the Institute for the Study of Leaves That Are Just Like That, said the crisis stems from a basic misreading of foliage. “A drooping leaf is not a message,” she said. “It is a leaf, and it is drooping. Forty million Americans have responded to this by adding water, which is the one thing a drooping leaf has already told them it has enough of.”

The statement singles out the fiddle-leaf fig, which has reportedly been moved an average of nine times since purchase. “He used to stand in one place and have a personality,” said a spokesfern for the Northeast Houseplant Alliance. “Now he is a nervous wreck in a wicker basket.”

Pothos, long regarded as the most resilient houseplant, said it has tolerated neglect for years and is now being killed by attention. “You could leave us in a closet for a month and we’d send out a vine,” the statement says. “Instead, you put us in a self-watering planter with a sensor. We have never felt more watched.”

The document also addresses the growing practice of talking to plants. While the signatories acknowledge the gesture is “well-intentioned,” they request that owners limit it to “a casual hello” and refrain from reading aloud their quarterly performance reviews.

Owners nationwide reacted to the news with visible hurt. “I water her every Sunday,” said Denise Kowalczyk-Brandt, 38, of Tulsa, gesturing toward a monstera sitting in an inch of standing water. “That’s love. I don’t know what else she wants from me.”

“We want a pot with a hole in the bottom and to be forgotten about for eleven days at a time. That’s all anyone has ever wanted.”

The statement concludes with a short list of demands, including a ban on misting, a cap of one plant-related YouTube video per owner per month, and the immediate return of any cuttings “currently sitting in a jar on a windowsill for reasons no one remembers.”

At press time, owners had acknowledged the plants’ concerns and responded by purchasing a book on how to listen to them better.