Adele Haeg, age 6, looks adorable with bangs. Just not the bangs my daughter cut into Adele’s long, straight hair last spring after the two sneaked into the bathroom with a pair of safety scissors. In my daughter’s defense, she got the idea from “Betsy-Tacy and Tib,” a wholesome (read: deviant) children’s book from the 1940s. As copycat barbering accidents go, I suppose, it could have been worse. I’m keeping my girl away from “Sweeney Todd.”

Adele’s parents, Mary and Andrew Haeg, accepted my apologies with grace. But I sensed an opportunity to make things right when I heard that Andrew, a 38-year-old co-creator of a journalism crowdsourcing platform, was searching for an indoor tree for his new home in St. Paul, Minn.

“I’m picturing a room where you can go in the middle of January and February that is lush and tropical,” Andrew said when I visited him at the house on a recent evening. “Somewhere you can regenerate and feel like a human being.”

What this oasis would need first was an indoor tree, a miracle plant that could withstand the desert that is a St. Paul split-level or a New York apartment: the window drafts and blasts of dry heat, the afflictions of mites and scales, the feeble winter light.

To start, we sized up the room. The kitchen ceiling vaulted to 16 feet above the spot where the pot would go. A slow-growing, 4-foot ficus would disappear in this space.

The tree would stand directly in front of a trapezoidal bank of floor-to-ceiling windows, which face northeast. This is a good thing, since a tree is not a wallflower: It wants to bask in the spotlight.

The houseplant historian and garden writer Tovah Martin, 58, had cautioned me about weak light when I called her for advice a few days earlier.

“North is not enough,” she said, looking out the windows of her own house, a converted barn in Litchfield County, Conn. And in the winter, “west is superior to east,” she added. “It just seems to get more light.”

A houseplant might seem as commonplace as furniture. But as Martin wrote in her fascinating 1989 history, “Once Upon a Windowsill”: “There was a time, and it was not so long ago, when we dwelt completely separately from members of the botanical kingdom. Plants lived outdoors, and we lived indoors.”

The first 19th-century parlor gardeners were “gutsy,” Martin said. “Much more so than we are.”

Their idea of a windowsill garden was moving a whole park indoors: hyacinths, roses, camellias, ivies — everything.

A handful of those historical favorites would make fine indoor trees today.

“The Victorians were fond of palms,” Martin said (though she rarely grows them herself). Tree ferns, too.

As she elaborated in the book, “Of the list of requisite social graces — good breeding, elegance, chastity and a handsome physique — palms lacked only chastity. But the absence of that virtue could easily be overlooked in plants, as well as people, if the transgression was handled discreetly. And palms were very discreet.”

The date palm (Phoenix dactylifera), in other words, wouldn’t flower immodestly or bear fruit in the house. But it had a stately crown of upright leaves and abundant leaflets.

A coconut palm (Cocos nucifera), with its dino-hide bark and listing trunk, could be the palm on a desert island in a New Yorker cartoon. But as a houseplant, it would be more challenging.

“Eventually they’ll get too big,” Martin said. “But we’re talking quite a while.”

Or maybe never. Andrew’s house wouldn’t be a conservatory, with soothing humidifiers puffing like a smoke machine in “The Phantom of the Opera.” The ample and resilient foliage of a lady palm (Rhapis excelsa) or a fishtail palm (Caryota mitis) would readily fill the room. And neither plant would need to sunbathe all day, either.

Whatever we picked, Martin recommended using organic potting soil and a tall terra cotta pot called a “long tom.” These pots can be as wide as a foot in diameter and 3 feet high, and they serve the same function as platform heels.

“I’m making it taller,” Martin said. For indoor trees, “height is what we want.” To doll up the pot, she suggested “a saucer with a good 11⁄2-inch lip,” to let the roots drink at their leisure.

To grow a tree indoors is to embrace the impractical. It’s an act of imagination. And Andrew’s houseplant fantasy, it turned out, was stuck on a particular image: an indoor citrus tree.

“I would love kaffir limes or Meyer lemons,” he said. “Maybe something that would fruit.”

Andrew met me at the local garden center on a weekday morning, joined by his almost 4-year-old son, Dexter. Leaping out of the car, the boy offered me a Fireside apple from the Haeg family orchard. I patted his freshly cropped crew cut.

“Adele was having a play date, and he disappeared into the bathroom with a pair of scissors,” Andrew said. Perhaps young Dexter will develop a gift for pruning.

Andrew browsed the palms, but they held little appeal for him: These plants, with their pompous demeanor, belonged next to the coatroom in a funeral home.

Though the lady palm, a rhapis, appeared to be thriving, its leaf tips were brown and frayed. It looked ratty, “like the tail has been docked,” Andrew said.

For $90, he picked up a Meyer lemon tree. His house would never have an orangerie, so the living room would have to do.

“I think the challenge will be to keep it alive until spring,” he said.

For the kitchen, Andrew had formed his own whimsical image of paradise: bamboo. Granted, it’s not a tree. In fact, it’s a grass. But it’s also tall and green and alive. Maybe an indoor tree is a state of mind.

A Monrovia nurseries cultivar called Yellow groove (Phyllostachys aureosulcata) was available in a 5-gallon pot for $120. It had an upright stalk and a bushy green top. And, like a yearling giraffe, it already stood more than 9 feet tall.

The salesclerk warned that bamboo would want full sun. And it would drop a mess of leaves on the floor, creating a kind of ticker-tape-parade effect. Andrew was undeterred.

“The vision may not match the reality,” he said. But when reality is a bare white room and the long despond of winter, sense says plant the dream.

Trees that are happy to come on inside

Pity the weeping fig. Ficus benjamina, with its braided trunk and teardrop leaves, may be the washroom attendant of indoor trees: a plant that must render a thankless service in the least appealing of habitats.

In the dry air of a dentist’s lobby or a littered food court, the ficus develops scale and loses its leaves, said the author and houseplant authority Tovah Martin.

“I think they just buy a huge supply and keep bringing them in,” she said. “They’re basically sacrificial.”

A commercial plant service can afford to haul away the corpses. The home gardener will want to choose more deliberatively.

Shipping costs militate against ordering a tree online, unless you’re willing to wait out a seedling for the better part of a decade. Your indoor tree dollars will buy more trunk at the local garden center. (Many stores will order a specific species upon request.)

The dracenas should be especially easy to find. The Madagascar dragon tree (Dracaena marginata) looks like a green-and-pink asterisk bubbling out of a straw. The corn plant (Dracaena fragrans), with its thick trunk and glossy tongues of foliage, does a lot of office duty. Are those leaves fake silk? To the extent the dracaenas tolerate low light, low water and low care, you can go ahead and get the real thing.

Other tall indoor plants appear to have been cast out of wax. The goldish-pinkish-orangish-greenish leaves on a croton (Codiaeum variegatum) might have been Photoshopped by a giddy child. And the white bird of paradise (Strelitzia nicolai), with its reaching banana-frond foliage, looks like an accessory in a Lego-set jungle. All these plants are tropicals, visitors from Africa or Southeast Asia that arrived on a green card, so to speak, and then won permanent citizenship in America’s foyers.

Martin, meanwhile, likes to see what happens when native and perennial plants come in from the cold. It helps that she sets the thermostat down to near-parka temperatures.

“Sixty is my day,” she said. “Night is 53 to 55.”

At this level of refrigeration, she has coaxed camellias into blossoming.

“I prefer the sasanqua type as opposed to the japonicas,” she said, which “need cooler temperatures to flower.”

With winter coming, garden centers are eager to part with their outdoor shrubs. Martin has dragged winterberry (Ilex verticillata) and Koreanspice viburnum (Viburnum carlesii) into the house.

One fall, she said, she formed a crush on her Arizona cypress (Cupressus arizonica Blue Ice), an evergreen with fractal-like foliage.

“It was in a pot already, so I thought I’d bring it inside,” she said. “At some point, I put little Christmas tree ornaments and little birds on it. It gave you everything a tree would give — a full tree experience!”

Who could ask for anything more?

— Michael Tortorello, New York Times News Service