Indoor Plant Care Tips Guide

This plant is the oddball of the large and motley group of plants in the greenhouse at work. For one thing, nobody knows what it is: I get asked on a pretty regular basis about it, and by employees as well as customers. (I've even been asked on more than one occasion by the same employee, which I would make fun of, but alas, I had to ask twice myself.)What it is, is Alternanthera dentata 'Purple

One of the first things I got to do when I started the new job was cut back a big Dracaena deremensis 'Warneckei' that had one cane that was too tall, and beginning to fall over. The particular plant in question was having all kinds of other problems too, mostly from being too hot and in too much sun, but there wasn't much we could do about that in late August. So I cut part off and shortened

I have to say, I'm surprised that Spathiphyllum would be the plant that I would choose for this project. Or that it would choose me. Whatever. I suspect the ultimate reason is that "cat" and "spath" share a vowel sound, so the progression from LOLcat to LOLSpath seemed more natural. I'm not saying it's meaningful or important, just that it's surprising to me. - As with previous LOLSpath

I feel like a bit of a rube when it comes to Lithops spp. I don't really . . . get them. It's not that I don't understand why they are the way they are, and they're unusual, so I get why people would find them interesting. But I don't feel the interesting, personally. What I feel about them is more like a non-sophisticate in a trendy Manhattan art gallery. "Check this one out, Ethel. It's a

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later: I've been tagged to participate in one of those web memes. When tagged, you must link to the person who tagged you, then post the rules before your list, and list eight random things about yourself. At the end of the post, you must tag and link to eight other people. Well. I'm not going to do that last part, the tagging of eight other people. I'm

I got this plant in a trade from a Garden Web member back in April 2007. It wasn't something I'd asked for, to trade � I had actually asked for an Aloe variegata (partridge-breast aloe), and the person with whom I was trading included several bonus Aloe cultivars and species in addition to the one I'd asked for. 1 So the plant and I were "set up," if you will. I was pleased to have bonus plants

I had always assumed that the fake snow people put on Christmas trees was something akin to Silly string, some sort of petroleum-based plastic that needed an aerosol can to be applied. And I have seen do-it-yourself kits for fake snow that seem to operate in more or less that way. At work, though, we fill orders for flocked trees by spraying trees with a mixture of water and glue, I'm told. The

The random plant events are almost happening faster than I can keep up with. By the time some of these posts get put up, the event will no longer even be happening. This particular post is a follow-up to a previous post, where I noted that this plant had buds. A week later, we have the thrilling conclusion. The above flower was going on Friday (23 Nov) when I left for work (about 7:45 AM),

When we were placing the big mid-October plant order from Florida this year, I, the boss, and WCW1 were scrolling through the list of offered plants on an Excel spreadsheet, and we got to a listing for venus flytraps. And I remember there was some kind of discussion of whether we needed to buy more, with WCW and I saying that we didn't because we couldn't keep them alive anyway and what was the

I was going to skip posting today, on the grounds that it's Thanksgiving and all, but then I remembered the Canadians, for whom today is just another Thursday, so I changed my mind. So. When I got into work yesterday, I saw that they'd gotten in new Schlumbergera on Tuesday while I was home, and I went around looking at what we'd gotten, when I saw this guy. Every other segment with buds has

Is there anything that can be said about Epipremnum aureum that hasn't been said already? I have my doubts. I spent a long time on-line doing search after search after search, trying to uncover something odd, or interesting, or even just new about it, and I got nothing. What they usually look like. Viney, eh? It's so ordinary, in fact, that a large percentage of the posts about it at Garden

1) I do not know why the site was inaccessible for part of the day on Monday the 19th. 2) I do not know why all other blogs using Blogger (now Google?) were also inaccessible. 3) I do not know whether this might happen again, how soon, or for what period of time.4) It does seem to be over for the time being, though.This has been an episode of "Useless Answers to Perfectly Reasonable Questions."

Bought this plant from work yesterday; I thought when I got it that it was a Gasteria, but the only Gasteria gallery I could find made me think that it couldn't be, because its leaves really are arranged as a rosette, not stacked up in two opposite orientations like almost every Gasteria I've ever seen. The leaves are smooth, with two exceptions: the tip of each leaf comes to a sharp point,

I broke some leaves off of a Peperomia caperata at work maybe a couple months ago, by accident. I figured I could try to salvage something by planting them, since Peperomia, like Begonia and Saintpaulia (African violet), are supposed to have the ability to generate new plants from single leaves, though I'd never tried it before and was kind of skeptical about whether it would work. (So many

To be honest, I find the whole cactus family to be one big confusing blur. I know a lot of the names � Mammilaria, Ferocactus, Opuntia, Rebutia, Cephalocereus, Echinocereus, Parodia, Myrtilocactus and so forth � but telling them apart from one another is often more than I can manage. It doesn't help that the names change sometimes, further mixing up any small bits I've been able to pin down. So

Different angle, bigger picture, but it's more or less the same stuff we've been seeing all along. Probably not going to be posting these for a while now, until there's some kind of noticeable change in color or number or something. We do still have a few that haven't really bloomed yet; some of the plants in the foreground have been close enough to the entrance into the store (which is sort of

My wonderful co-worker1 has one of these at home, I guess, which she took a bunch of cuttings from in the spring, and brought in to root and sell. Then, I guess, spring happened, and was busy, and so they never actually got put out to sell even though they apparently rooted pretty easily. Then this fall, she found the tag that went with the original plant, which identified the particular

Let me be up-front about this. This is not an easy plant to grow indoors. Not an incredibly easy plant outdoors, either, though that's going to depend somewhat on where you find yourself when you open your doors, I suppose. I can't even pretend to be unbiased about this one: I don't consider it an indoor plant at all, period, full stop. Now I know there are people out there who are going to read

I know these aren't everyone's taste. (Not that anybody's complained -- I just know they're not.) But this one, when I saw how it turned out, actually did make me chuckle a little. So I hope everyone will be willing to indulge me from time to time. (Explanation of lolcats, from which these derive, was here.)

If you're reading this (and apparently you are), you probably already know a thing or two about bromeliads. For example, you probably know that most of them are grown for their pretty spectacular flowers1. You might know that most of them are epiphytes, and grow on tree branches in the wild, not in soil. You probably know that pineapples are bromeliads, and that they're one of the exceptions to

We sold our first points on November 5; since then, they're not exactly flying out the door, but they're beginning to mosey, at least. Which I take it is how it's supposed to be. We've hit full color on a few varieties, and all of them are showing color of some kind or another. It turns out that the angle I chose for pictures isn't ideal for demonstrating this: all the most impressive flowers are

For some reason, both of the bamboo palms (Chamaedorea seifrizii) at work have flowered recently. Maybe they do this every year and I just never noticed when I was a customer. Maybe it's special. Don't know. But in any event, it was my first time to see these particular flowers, so I took pictures, which I pass on to you.The first two pictures, in particular, are clearer if you click on them to

Pretty much all you have to do for this plant is give it reasonably bright light (full sun is best, though it will live through a lot less than that) and not overwater. They're very, very easy. Kind of too easy, actually. And B. daigremontianum (sometimes Kalanchoe daigremontiana; Bryophyllum appears to be the current taxonomic consensus, though) isn't, like, the bane of my existence or

This is mostly directed at the anonymous person who left the comment about footnotes on ">Clivia miniata, but everybody else may as well know too: I think I kinda figured out how to do clickable footnotes.If I've done things right, clicking on the footnote in the main text should bring you down to the footnotes section, and then clicking on the footnote in the footnotes text should bring you back

I was pretty sure, starting this one, that I wanted a Hawaiian "people" term for the article title. For one thing, Ardisia elliptica is an invasive species in Hawaii, which is the main thing I know about the plant, and for another, my husband lived there for a while, off and on, so I have a handy reference source for these kinds of words, so why not. So I ask him what would be the word for

For those of you who have somehow managed to miss the whole LOLcats phenomenon and are looking at this saying, "What the hell?", please click here for an explanation. Picture was created using the Awesum Cheezeburger Factory LOLcat Builder. There will be more LOLSpaths, though it's harder than it looks, so probably not very many or very often.

Clivia and I have only just met. I've been hearing about them for quite a while, both from people at Garden Web who are enthusiastic about them, and from a co-worker, but I don't often see them in the stores (the last one I saw in a store was in February, in Ames, IA, at a bizarre but cool little organic-greenhouse-slash-antique-shop1, but it happened to be next to a Fatsia japonica with a bad

I've talked previously about how we got our poinsettias in two different batches; the majority came from a company in Pella (IA) that appears to be a major greenhouse supplier in the area, and then we had a second batch, about 1/3 the size of the first, from a different grower in Centerville. Along with the Centerville plants came whiteflies. A few of the Pella plants may also have had a

I am not the world's best salesman. I don't fake enthusiasm easily,1 I lie pretty well but only if I have time to think about it first, I am naturally suspicious of anybody I don't know, and really suspicious of people I don't know who want me to give them money2. And, more to the point, I expect that everybody else feels the same way. So I will knock myself out to try to find a plant that

About a year ago, I bought a couple of Codiaeum variegatum 'Gold-Dust'. I don't remember why, exactly: we had just cleared off a lot of space in front of the (south-facing) living room window, so maybe the logic was just that I had full sun, therefore, I needed some full-sun plants. I'm pretty sure that I knew that they could be difficult when I bought them. I think I'd even had them before, or

This started happening a while ago; the first flowers of the Dracaena surculosa opened on Friday. I had been looking forward to this since seeing buds, because I'd seen a few things that said that the flowers smell like airplane glue, which seemed like a weird enough occasion (even though I don't necessarily like the smell of airplane glue) to be worth looking forward to. Glasshouse Works, in

More or less the same shot (angle, etc.) as the earlier post's picture, a little over a week later:Not a huge difference, but a difference nevertheless.

(The plant in this post was originally identified as Carludovica 'Jungle Drum,' because that's how they're typically identified, if they're identified at all, so if you've arrived from a link or Google search about Carludovica, you're probably still in the right place. However, I think it's much more likely that the plant in question is actually an Asplundia, and refer to it as such. This doesn't