Indoor Plant Care Tips Guide

I've mentioned before, probably more than once, that I generally have at least one Anthurium blooming at any given moment. Here's what I had going on March 23. Just 'cause.A NOID pink flower, from my longest-lived Anthurium (at one time, I suspected 'Cotton Candy,' but I've never had any idea; pink Anthuriums are pretty common. The photo didn't really reproduce the color well: it's basically just

I discovered this during the last round of watering, on the 22nd. I'd seen the Stapelia start a number of buds since I bought it last summer, but most of them aborted while still tiny, and I'd pretty much given up on looking for flowers around November. Which all means that by the time I found this one, it was already huge, roughly 6 inches (15 cm) from tip to base. I'm not especially looking

This is one of the orchids from Saturday's orchid show in the Quad Cities. Full-size view is recommended. I don't have a lot to say about the orchid, which I think is pretty self-evidently cool, and any commentary I had would be roughly along the lines of hey, isn't this orchid pretty self-evidently cool?, which seems like a waste of your time and mine. In Sheba news:As of Day 3, the allergies

The longish essay-type thing I had planned for today first turned into a different post than I had intended to write, and neither the original idea nor the new one were ready by the time I woke up yesterday. Also the coffeemaker has decided to stop working, plus we'd already been planning to go to the Illowa Orchid Society Spring Show at Wallace's, in Bettendorf (~1 hour away) yesterday so that I

An old picture today; I haven't seen Nina do this in a very long time. Maybe just a phase she was going through? You know how a lot of kids these days are experimenting with tail-curling.Plans to try to add some pictures of Sheba, or whatever her name is, failed to come together fast enough, but I will try to get some for next week's Saturday morning Nina and/or Sheba picture post.

As with the Plectranthus x 'Mona Lavender' I wrote about on Tuesday, the Murraya paniculata flowers sporadically all the time, but has gotten really excited all of a sudden, within the last week or so. Possibly the trigger was that I moved it to the watering station and gave it a good soaking and showering a couple weeks back. It's heavy, so this is hard to do, and doesn't happen that often. In

We did adopt Sheba. I don't react allergically at all to her saliva, apparently, and only slightly to her dander (which might not be her: it could be something else from the shelter), so I think this should work. Won't be able to say it's definitely worked until some time has gone by, of course, but I think there's reason to be optimistic, based on how things have gone so far. It was a very long

The website for Twyford International, a tissue-culture company located in Florida, with a separate facility in Costa Rica, lists a large number of plants that are very familiar to me, that we got from Florida all the time when I worked in the garden center. Twyford produces and either holds the patent on, or has applied for a patent on: Aglaonema 'Golden Bay;' (Correction: Whatever Twyford's

Informed as of about three hours ago that SHEBA IS GO. Repeat, SHEBA IS GO. In-person allergy check is expected to be around 1-2 PM CDT tomorrow, and if that goes even remotely well, she'll be home with us by maybe about 4 PM tomorrow.

I've had this plant for almost a year now, and it's flowered off and on in that time, but never anything terribly impressive. It wasn't a particularly big plant, either, of course, but I think the main problem was that it wasn't happy with how much light it was getting. Since we got to the new house, and the plant got one of the choice spots in the southwest corner of the plant room, though, it's

So far, the husband and I have looked at about sixty dogs, roughly eighty of which were pit bulls.1 The one out of the sixty that we both agreed we really really liked and wanted (a German shepherd / black lab mix; very similar to Fervor, but about 1/3 the size, less into play-biting, and female) was adopted out from under us before we could even figure out for sure whether I was allergic.2We've

All right now. Here's Part II of the Phalaenopsis profile, where I tell you how to grow them indoors. If you're in the mood for genetics (or interested in finding out about the origins of the song "Yes, We Have No Bananas"), you may want to read Part I first.There are 60 or so natural Phalaenopsis species, which are distributed throughout Southeast Asia, with a number of species in India,

This is why I can't have nice things.We took Fervor back to the shelter around 3 this afternoon because the allergy thing was getting less ambiguous and more obviously something I wouldn't be able to live with for the next year, five years, twelve years, whatever. Obviously this sucks tremendously for me and the husband; from Fervor's perspective, though, he got a 4-day vacation from the shelter

Today we have this fairly lame, but current, picture of my old (since January 2003) Spathiphyllum of some undetermined large cultivar (maybe 'Sensation,' maybe 'Mauna Loa,' maybe something else), and its developing inflorescence, which I first noticed on Sunday. This happens every once in a while. It's never particularly pretty, even by the fairly low standards we use for Spathiphyllum flower

Reginald Farrer famously compares Oncocyclus to mourning Troads, that flash brilliantly and then perish. If that is so, Iris iberica ssp. elegantissima is Hecuba, queen of Troy. I probably took this picture twenty or more years ago: I remember when I first started to grow Oncocyclus. They emerge in winter, and start budding up in early spring, and we invariably get snow after snow and we're traumatized. And they still seem to persist, then bloom and knock your socks off. This vegetative masterpiece inspired Georgia O'Keefe, who painted it. I don't think her painting improves on the real thing, by the way (for a bit of heresy). There's nothing like the real thing . It is still apparently fairly common near Ararat, blooming in May and June. I have seen pictures of hillsides covered with it, like so many hankies blowing in the wind. It commands good prices and is a mainstay of serious rock garden bulb enthusiasts who struggle with it. In Colorado it just wants fresh, w...

I'm realizing that a really insane percentage of the non-Phalaenopsis orchids we sold at work are1 from the Oncidium alliance.2 This is kind of surprising to me. I mean, it's not that they're not nice flowers, and I understand Oncidium itself, at least, is supposed to be easy to grow, so it makes sense. It's more just, I think, that the forms and colors are so varied, it's strange to realize that

(Sorry this is up late. Daylight Saving Time is responsible.)Happy Pi Day!Fervor's left me both pretty exhausted and without as much time as I'd hoped, so the posts for the next couple weeks might be a little lighter on text and photos than had previously been the case, except for Part II of the Phalaenopsis profile, which is already written. Maybe there'll be something more substantial if I can

The new season is quickly advancing and there are lots of things actually in bloom: I've taken lots of pix, but I wait to download them until there's enough...so I went to this file of pictures I scanned a few years ago from old transparencies. A depressing number of them are extinct from my garden, including this morsel. This is a miniature, deep blue Dracocephalum : it is probably Dracocephalum paulseni , although it could be the rather similar D. aucheri --I have grown and loved both, and both have departed. I could go on and on about blue cushion plants, and my love of mints. Instead, let me say that no matter what plant I had dredged up (incognito: the images only show up as numbers when I upload them), likely nine out of ten would be no longer with me, although the slides date from recent decades. I am often asked at talks (so effective has the lobbying been by the native purity nazis) if I am afraid a plant I introduce will be weedy: how to explain that generally speakin...

This particular SMNP was a little rushed, and possibly not up to the usual standard. I mean, Nina still looks her usual regal/haughty/elegant self, but I'm not particularly happy with how the photo turned out.But I have a good reason for why the picture-taking was rushed, which I would like to present in the form of a story.About 28 years ago, my parents taught a Sunday School class. This is less

The inevitable future snowfalls aside, spring is pretty well accomplished here. The weather forecast involves multiple consecutive days of above-freezing temperatures at night, and 50s during the day. Most of the snow has melted, sunset is happening later and later, and the whole world is starting to get that wet-dog smell.And there are Violas showing up at my ex-work, which is as sure a sign of

The main problem with trying to write a Phalaenopsis profile is that there's so much information available, it's easy to get bogged down and lose track of what's interesting and what isn't. Not that everybody's going to agree on what's interesting in the first place, of course. But you know what I mean. Much to sort through. I started this off with really good intentions, but quickly wound up on

A reader e-mailed me an interesting link this morning, to a site with a lot of interesting macro photos of cacti, as well as even some photos taken with the aid of a microscope, which makes me sad all over again that my plans to get a microscope last spring didn't work out. The cacti in question appear to be mainly Mammillarias. A Close-up View of Several Members of the Cactus Family

The ex-job got another batch of grafted cacti a little while ago. They're all Hylocereus stock with lurid mutant Gymnocalycium scions (The stock is the base, the scion is the top. I kind of knew this already, but I think I only really got the vocabulary down as of yesterday.), and mostly I'm just kind of meh, whatever about grafted plants in general, but there was one in this batch that was a

Because of last Friday's list of "Houseplants You'll Want to be Growing During the Zombie Apocalypse of 2014," on track to be my most popular PATSP post ever, I am now aware that there is an entire year-old website devoted to the inevitable zombie apocalypse. It is of course called www.inevitablezombieapocalypse.com. I'm not adding it to my blogroll or anything, but I thought you should know.

I tried growing an Oxalis triangularis (very similar to O. regnellii but green instead of purple) a couple years ago, but it didn't go well; I gave up on it when it started to go dormant, 'cause I didn't know they'd come back. I know better now, but don't have that much interest in them. Maybe if they didn't have to go dormant every so often, but unfortunately they do. I also have some concerns

My photo files are filled with plants I have loved and lost. Few rankle quite like this one: I realize white flowers are generally not a nurseryman's faves. Certain people I know have even said "white is not a color: it is the absence of color". Those scientifically inclined might even say it's all colors in one. Whatever! But just look at that little munchkin, tucked alongside the pink granite just right, with that ghostly tint. Oh yes, I guess I should tell you: this is Chamaerhodos mongolica , a rather charming name. "Ground rose" indeed: I noticed that generic in our Colorado flora and conjured a gorgeous, groundcovering rose. Our native species forms a filigree rosette two or three inches across at most, and blooms the second year with a spike of gray green flowers that are truly insignificant. Even so, I was thrilled to find virtually the same plant in Central Asia last summer...but this tiny shrub, with its pristine white blossoms eluded me in the wil...

PreambleAs regular readers know, I am very -- indeed, almost frighteningly -- interested in trying to get plant names right. Sometimes they're wrong anyway, but this is never from laziness or disinterest. As proof, for anyone who may be unconvinced, I offer this recent post, which was all about announcing that I had taken most of a day to correct spelling and IDs on plants mentioned in the blog

Three different takes on the idea of "red" today. I tried to come up with something to say about working in the garden center at this time of year, but even as a PG-13 blog, there are limits to how much obscene language I'm comfortable using here. So I won't. Instead, I will point out how the three red flowers in question sort of represent winter, spring, and summer, even if they do happen to be

The husband and I had a dog for about an hour and a half on Thursday. Not had exactly, but it lived in our house and ate dog food we bought, so it sort of counts. It happened because I saw this Husky running around in the neighbor's yard, no leash, no people nearby, and I thought, well, if it were my Husky, I'd want somebody to try to find me. So the husband and I went out and called the dog, who

(Howdy to visitors from Homegrown Evolution!)Although we can't be certain about the location or severity of the upcoming Zombie Apocalypse of 2014, we have a fairly good idea what it's going to involve: there will be zombies, brains will be eaten, civilization as we know it will end, and people will need to be resourceful. And also, obviously, we know it's going to happen sometime in the year

At long last, after several months of taking all the plants to the kitchen sink to be watered individually, I can water plants in a bathtub with a detachable showerhead again. The degree of overall life improvement this represents can hardly be overstated. Watering has just gotten much, much faster, because I can now water more than one plant at a time. I can also keep the plants dusted a little

I'm not impressed by these pictures. I don't know what went wrong here exactly, but they don't strike me as being . . . right, somehow. Still, they're the only pictures I've got, so I guess I have to use them anyway.As is sadly typical with orchids, the name is sort of a word salad. Vuylstekeara is also orchid-typical in that it's a three-genus hybrid (also called a trigeneric hybrid, which means

Didn't have a clue what to blog about so I literally clicked on a random picture in my files and this shot of Kendrick Lake popped up: not surprising since I (and everyone else on the planet it seems) have taken a lot of pictures there. This shot does tell an interesting story, looking at the mix of American, African and Eurasian drylanders mixed up together...Interesting to note that the bright reds and yellows only occupy a fraction of the picture: texture is the real theme...since there is something different blooming every few weeks, this garden achieves greatness by combining bright color with wonderful plant form. A few weeks after this picture was taken a devastating hail really did wreak havoc: the staff there took advantage of that to really tear the place up and add lots of new features. One of the secrets of this garden is just how radically it is constantly made over. Time to wreak a little havoc in mine as well...if I can get some time to work out there! The first b...

According to Wikipedia, the term "it girl" was coined for Clara Bow, the hot silent film actress of the time, and has been used ever since as a term for the hottest, most popular actress of whatever given moment you're talking about. I'm not sure who the It Girl of 2010 is, but I'm pretty sure Julia Roberts was the It Girl of 1990, if that tells you anything about the term.Clara Bow, 1927, in the

I don't know much about Medinilla. WCW has grown them indoors before, but all that really tells me is that it's in the kingdom Plantae. Can't imagine they're particularly easy indoors. I have not yet seen any of the flower buds actually open yet, and sort of doubt I'll have the chance to: stuff like this tends to sell before the show ever gets started.