Indoor Plant Care Tips Guide

Schlub. n. (slang) A stupid, clumsy, or unattractive person. From Yiddish. Poor Tradescantia pallida. It gets no respect from anybody. It's the Rodney Dangerfield of plants. Not long ago, I was talking with the guy who's in charge of the nursery lot at work, who stopped to make the comment that the plant pictured here didn't look half bad. Had he stopped there, we would have been fine, but

Tray of Agave victoriae-reginae at workIn my earlier post about Agave victoriae-reginae, I mentioned that the one I actually have at home is 1) kind of a blue-green color and 2) has almost imperceptible backward-angled spines along the leaf edges. Now that I have a usable camera,1 we can back up and I can offer some retroactive proof for what I was talking about. About the blue-green color:The

If Pilea caderei were a person, it would be a teenage boy: it wants to be everywhere at once, is more often in an awkward phase than not, and needs a grower who can set some boundaries once in a while, lest it throw wild drunken parties all night long. It has some pretty specific ideas about exactly what it wants, too, with respect to lighting (bright indirect or filtered sun) and humidity (the

I didn't have to work on Thursday, which meant that I had to water plants at home instead. (It's pretty much always one or the other.) While doing so, I kept smelling an odd scent, but I couldn't figure out where it was coming from, or even if it was coming from inside, until I picked up my Crassula muscosa (also sometimes known as Crassula lycopoidiodes) and saw these tiny little flowers on it:.

Yucca guatemalensis (more widely known by the incorrect name Y. elephantipes) is my very favorite houseplant. This is not to say that there aren't others that I like very very much, but I would be nearly inconsolable if I were to lose mine, particularly since I have a couple variegated versions that I haven't seen anywhere else, ever, which wouldn't be easy to replace. The first one of these,

This is what I come to every day at work: a vast sea of greenish poinsettias.Just thought you might like the visual.

Dracaena deremensis 'Janet Craig' works hard. Nobody labels screencaps of TV shows according to what plants are in the background, which makes this difficult to prove to you, but I managed to find two pictures. The first is of D. deremensis 'Janet Craig' acting on the set of "The Office:" Personally, I think the plant was doing more believable work in the second season (that picture is from

Well, God bless Sears. Went out today to try to get a camera to use for the blog: it wasn't that I don't appreciate the generosity of the people who have volunteered their photos, because of course I do, but I didn't think I was going to be able to handle it, emotionally, if I couldn't post about any plants until I tracked down a public domain photo. When I'm in the mood to talk about a plant,

You know, normally I would say that "lucky bamboo" is a pretty cynical attempt at selling crap (alligator feet, assorted coins, not just dreamcatchers but paintings of dreamcatchers, sleeper sofas, etc.) by associating it with luck. This is something that people have been doing for ages, and has a long, if not honorable, history.1 But it has occurred to me that I'm looking at it from the wrong

The greenhouse where I work is only a small part of the overall business: there's also a flower shop (which delivers). One of the guys in the flower shop and I were discussing peace lilies (Spathiphyllum spp.), and he commented that he has a lot of people call up and want to order a green plant of some kind, but of course they don't know their plants especially well, so they almost always wind up

Let me say first that "psychopath" is probably a bit strong for this particular species of Agave. It's the only Agave I personally own, and although it is pretty well-behaved, really, all things considered, its brethren where I work are pot-breaking, knife-waving maniacs. Several weeks back, I was running around in the greenhouse, doing whatever it is that I usually do there, when I noticed a

The greenhouse / garden center where I work got its poinsettia orders in on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. Everybody had been talking about this for so long � all scary stuff, too, like you think this is bad, wait 'til the points1 get here, it'll take four or five of us an hour or two just to unload the truck � but the event itself, at least the first time, wasn't that terrible. On Tuesday,

Over the past year, my life has increasingly revolved around plants, specifically tropical houseplants, to the point where things now have gotten completely out of hand. I work in a greenhouse / garden center, as of Aug. 2007, and I have approximately 300 plants in my home right now, though that number varies.I don't remember ever not having houseplants around: when I was something like 5 or 6