Indoor Plant Care Tips Guide

This work plant bloomed a few weeks ago, and I wasn't sure at the time what it was. Eventually I came up with a guess: I'm guessing it's an Aeonium of some sort. (Can someone confirm?) The flowers aren't anything to get too excited over, but they definitely look different than a lot of the other succulent flowers at work, so I figured I'd share.The plant, for context and ID purposes.The flower.

Calibrachoa has been a problematic genus for us where I work, at least since I've been there. Last year, they all did okay up until a couple months into the season, where most of them suddenly and irreversibly yellowed (probably a mineral deficiency: iron was suspected but never proven). This year, we gave them a different fertilizer, on Younger Co-Worker's suggestion, one that had trace elements

This little lady (pictured) is going to be going through some serious caffeine and sugar withdrawals in the next couple days. I found her in a garbage bag full of soda cans (long story), where presumably she'd been subsisting on drops of Pepsi since arriving in one of the tropicals on March 6. We will probably be taking her to the city water treatment plant, where they have a terrarium set up in

The last few days have been kinda bad for me personally, and part of the badness was not having enough time to sort out material for the blog, so I have to dip into the transmitted light photo reserves. On the up side, the houseplant-toxicity book came in through interlibrary loan, so the long-awaited plant-toxicity post should be coming along fairly soon. The previous transmitted light posts can

I associate close-up pictures of Violas with Fairegarden, because one of the first posts of hers I saw (and I'm almost positive the first post I commented on) was all about the volunteer Violas that had popped up in her garden last year, and the unique and varied flowers that resulted. I don't quite have it in me to create names and biographies for each of these twelve flowers like Frances did,

This wasn't supposed to happen. As far as I've ever heard, the whole bromeliad-offsetting thing is pretty straightforward: there's a plant, the plant flowers, it grows offsets, the original dies, the offsets flower, the offsets grow offsets, the offsets die, and so on. Simple enough.But I have a plant at home that's trying something different, apparently.I bought this -- some Vriesea of unknown

I got in some Euphorbia milii in the last round of tropicals (beginning of March), and found that one of them had a weird, deformed-looking . . . thing on it that I'd never seen before. WCW and I suspect it may be a successfully-pollinated flower, but it's difficult to be certain, since 1) we've never seen a successful pollination before and 2) when I look at this, "successful" is not one of the

WARNING: There will be spoilers here for the last episode of "Battlestar Galactica" herein, as well as spoilers from the rest of the show. Do not read further if you haven't seen the show and think you might want to be surprised by stuff later. [Deep sigh]This was, as one of the commenters at rifters.com said, one of those endings that made me wish I'd never started watching the show at all. It

. . . Aaaaaaand we're back from hiatus. I got much less done (in terms of the blog) than I had hoped, but that's sort of always the case. These are pictures of Clarkia 'Satin.' The tags actually said Godetia, but davesgarden.com says that Clarkia is current now, a number of other sites more or less confirmed that, and anyway thinking the word Godetia makes me feel like I'm in a cheerleading movie

It's apparently Gerbera season: we've just started getting them in at work again. I don't have a lot to say about these: I think gerbs are pretty self-explanatory.This also serves as the announcement of my spring hiatus: there will be no new posts from 20-23 March, and then we're back to business as usual with a post of some kind on the 24th.

from slacktivist, about AIG:It's not so much that they're paying out huge bonuses after accepting billions in bailout funds from taxpayers. It's that they're paying out huge bonuses to the guys who, you know, nearly destroyed the world's economy. Screwing over millions of formerly hard-working people ought to be its own reward.

We've just gotten some Gardenia jasminoides in at work, after several months of only having one kind of problematic large one that refused to bud (and then disappeared when it did start to bud), so I've been reacquainting myself. They don't actually spend all day lurking in the shadows, but when I saw that that was the direction the photo was heading, I elected to run with it.

I did this at work yesterday, and thought it came out well enough to be worth sharing. I intended to hide them better, but was hampered by a limited pebble palette: some greenish or bluish pebbles would have helped a great deal. Or some black or yellowish Lithops. Whichever.

Philodendron hederaceum is a fairly tolerant, attractive houseplant. It's very similar to, and often confused with, pothos (Epipremnum aureum), to which it is related.1 Personally, I like it better than pothos, and find it easier to grow (hence the lower difficulty rating), but I am not typical that way. In fairness to the Philodendron, a ridiculously large number of people (including a shocking

Like a lot of the pictures here, this doesn't quite do justice to the subject, but oh well, it's as good as I could manage. Last year at work, we had the related variety Impatiens 'Fusion Glow,' which was nice, but never quite did it for me. The flowers were interesting, certainly, but as they aged, they turned lighter in color, and then the ones we didn't sell also developed yellowish foliage

Okay. I said I'd try to get some good pictures of the Anthuriums out of the box they arrived in (the pictures of them in box are here), and I sort of succeeded, in that these are pictures of the plants out of the box. They're not especially good pictures, still, but you should be able to get the general shape and color of things.'Dakota.''Pandola.'Not pictured: 'Florida,' which we've seen before

The tags that came with this particular plant identify it as Graptopetalum panaquayense, a spelling that, if you Google it, you'll find is only used by one company, Proven Winners. Everybody else calls it G. paraguayense, which makes more sense, because Paraguay is an actual place where one might find plants that one would then name after their place of discovery, and "Panaquay" is gibberish.

A week and a half ago, in a post called "Coming Attractions," I made reference to something so super-cool that I couldn't even tell you what it was. Well. Um. What it was, was a digital microscope, which I am sorry to inform you turned out to be kind of a piece of crap. The basic idea sounded good. There are all kinds of interesting things that I'm sure would be even more dramatic at a micro

If you're reading this at http://growerflower .biz/blogs /Flower-grower-in- california/ ("Flower Grower in California:" link is broken on purpose), you're reading content scraped from my blog without permission. Actual original blogging about flowers, and the growing of flowers, can be found at the blog Plants are the Strangest People, which is awesome. Flower Grower in California should probably

Imagine what it's like to open a box and find this inside. I want these so bad. The money is not so much the issue (I've rationalized bigger plant purchases before.), but the space. I don't have anywhere to put something like this. Maybe if I got rid of a bunch of my current plants, but that's problematic too, as you can imagine. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted.And this isn't even a very

Either what I have is not a cold, or cold medicine is just a gigantic placebo scam, or both. I'm sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, feverish, etc.: basically the whole NyQuil commercial except for the part where NyQuil helps. (That, and: I have no problems sleeping whatsoever, and do so for about 13 hours a day.) As I write this (Monday morning), we've reached the stage where the inside of my

The husband and I went up to Piersons last week because WCW told me that they were having their Annual Variable-Duration Post-Valentine's-Day 50%-Off Sale (henceforth AVDPVD50POS). I'd been up there once recently, in I think early January, and wasn't terribly impressed with what they had then -- it wasn't that it was bad stuff, it was just very normal stuff, and there wasn't a lot of it, and

This is one of the mixed bulb gardens I was talking about the other day. They usually don't stick around long enough to reach this level of blatant awesomeness.

Ordinarily I write posts in advance and then have them post at 4:30 AM my time, which up until today Blogger has allowed me to do. That's not working now, though (the QFTHM about the bonsai was actually supposed to go up tomorrow). It remains to be seen what effects, if any, this will have on subsequent posting.Between this and my new cold, which is adding new unpleasant symptoms at an alarming

Last week was New Plants Week: a new batch of tropicals came in, including some of the most awesome Anthuriums you've ever seen (which will be a separate post later), and among them were some 4" bonsai plants. No IDs on them, unfortunately, but one of them had this lovely flower:It looked a little goofy on the plant. Bonsai is supposed to be all about creating the illusion of a radically

I believe I'm coming down with a cold. Sore throat all day yesterday, coughing, sneezing, swollen lymph nodes, etc. This kinda sucks. Let's try not to expect too much from the blogging for the next few days.But you're here for the plant, so:I'm not a big fan of Bougainvillea. They drop bracts everywhere in the greenhouse, and they have thorns that are sharp enough to stab me through jeans at work

Transmitted light time again. This is maybe not the most impressive batch, but there are still some nice ones. (See the other transmitted light posts here.)Ardisia elliptica. The speckles are apparently a normal part of Ardisia leaves. Other pictures, and other species, have shown the same thing.Pedilanthus tithymaloides. Nearly impossible shot to get (the leaves are thick, making the image muddy

So, okay, dear readers, I haven't posted the Philodendron hederaceum profile just yet, even though it's been in the sidebar as the next profile for, like, weeks now. There are lots of good reasons for this, which are not likely to be that interesting to you but are totally valid. (I'm still working on it. It'll happen soonish. It's done, as of 16 March 2009.)But!I've decided to take this piece

One of our suppliers sells us pre-made bulb gardens from time to time, which usually contain some daffodils (often Narcissus 'Tete a Tete'), some Crocuses, and some Scillas Puschkinias. I see lots of the daffodils, and quite a few Crocuses, but by the time the Scilla Puschkinia flowers open, the pot has already sold, or else work is crazy and I just can't get a moment to stop and take a picture.

In the Zamioculcas zamiifolia profile, I mentioned the existence of a 'Mini' cultivar. (I called it 'Zamicro,' because that's the name the article I found mentioned, but I think 'Mini' is the same thing, or at least close to it.) Didn't have pictures, still haven't seen one in person, but I have a picture second-hand from Florida to show y'all. 'Mini' is on the left, and the regular ZZ plant is

I was getting a little worried about the Aeschynanthus: I posted at the end of December when we had a few flowers from one of these plants, but since then I've been getting kind of worried about them, because we had those few flowers I took the picture of, and then -- nothing. For what seemed like quite a while. In my memory, these were blooming pretty steadily from about Christmas onward last

This morning before work, I went to Amazon.com and bought some stuff, which I'm sure will eventually result in some blog posts somewhere down the road.Gratuitous Cryptanthus 'Black Mystic' flower shot. I know the file name says 'Black Magic.' I can't seem to ever get that right the first time. I'm not even sure there's a difference, from what comes up with Google image searches.I've decided that

Back in early December, I reported that we had a Kalanchoe thyrsifolia that had started to bloom. Well, it's still blooming now, but the old flowers aren't drying up and falling off like they would on most plants: they're hanging around. Not sure what's going on -- they don't seem to be doing anything in particular -- but it makes for a dramatic picture. This is best when opened in a new window.