| Phoenix Wright |
| Charley. A quite decorative plant. He's a handful, but I've grown quite attached to the little fella. He also helps me to remember all the good times with Mia. |
Charley is a potted plant of the species Cordyline stricta (also known as the Slender Palm Lily, or Narrow-leaved Palm Lily) that has been in the Wright Anything Agency ever since the agency's founding by Mia Fey as the law office, Fey & Co. Law Offices. Fey loved the plant, even giving it its name, and going as far as to make it the firm's official mascot. After Fey's death, her student, Phoenix Wright, inherited the offices and left it about the same as it was in Fey's time, including keeping and taking care of Charley. However, Wright did not find out about the name until a month later, when Mia Fey's sister Maya Fey channeled Mia and it came up in a conversation between the two.
Charley has been subjected to Maya Fey's overenthusiastic watering, which has resulted in the plant looking a little "swollen" and has lead Wright to wonder if Maya was perfecting her water torture technique on the defenseless plant. Ema Skye's well meaning attempts to improve Charley with an unknown additive resulted in the plant appearing a little yellow. Despite these unintentional attempts on its life, Charley has seen the office it resides in through Wright's entire career and even after Wright was disbarred.
The presence of Charley has shown an unexpected botanical knowledge in Dick Gumshoe, who quickly chipped in with the plant's scientific name while Wright was trying to identify it the day after Mia's murder.
Name
"Charley" is a diminutive of the male given name "Charles". This is may be a homage to "Chuck the Plant" (the name "Chuck" also being a diminutive of "Charles"), an in-game potted plant that originally appeared in the 1987 Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts) graphic adventure game Maniac Mansion. The plant's appearance became somewhat of a running joke and reappeared in other Lucas adventure titles like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure and Tales of Monkey Island. If Charley is a reference to Chuck, it would not be the only non-LucasArts game to do so: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind featured an easily overlooked potted plant called "Charles".