In the rush to close offices as the new coronavirus spread, employees grabbed laptops, gym bags and stray Tupperware.

Many left behind their desk plants. A month later, they are wondering what’s become of them.

“Those plants are probably having conversations in their own language, asking, ‘Where did everyone go? How long are we going to be here?’ ” said Julia Goldberg, BuzzFeed’s Los Angeles-based head of facilities and security.

Skeleton crews of workers securing and cleaning office buildings have become caretakers of other people’s plants. Other workers have gone on rescue missions to extricate office greenery and let it shelter at home with them.

New York-based copy editor Adam LoBelia, 36, was on plant “patrol” last month at his office. Many colleagues given the option had decamped for home. He decided to stay behind at the office, where he carried out plant-care requests; “in everyone’s emails they specified exactly how much water.”

That worked out well for the plants until the state’s essential-businesses-only order came down and he had to leave. “I did my best, and I think I saved at least a couple lives,” he said. “Some of those, I think, are gonna be OK.”

The San Francisco e-commerce company where Martha Smith works was early to ask workers to stay home, and she had been OK with her setup for the first few days of March.

Ms. Smith, 38, had inherited plants from a co-worker who moved to another job just weeks ago, and her company had offered employees the chance to run back in to get anything from their desks they needed. “I said, ‘I’m gonna rescue the plants!’ ”

When she got into the office, her fiddle-leaf fig was on the outs from no water and more-than-partial shade, so she packed up it and a couple of others from her desk. They were luckier than the 40-some communal ferns and succulents on a partition nearby.