Indoor Plant Care Tips Guide

This is a particularly fun category for me to contemplate, because I really like plants with big honking leaves. Always have. So for this list, I went around the house and measured the biggest leaves on some of my plants, to see how everything measured up. Because it was fun.1 Some explanations and disclaimers: The plants listed with photos below are plants I personally own, along with the

Occasionally, with the orchids, one is moved to ask what is the point. I mean, I guess the color's nice, if you can see it. Google tells me that the species lives high in the mountains of Columbia and Ecuador, and prefers cooler temperatures and lots of moisture. Presumably the pollinators at those altitudes are so hard up for flowers that they have no standards, hence the tiny orange things here

It's bad enough that one of my Schlumbergeras (the pink one) has decided to disintegrate completely, following what was apparently a badly-timed repotting (though the peach/salmon one was repotted at the same time, and seems really happy about the repotting, putting out new growth for the first time in forever), but 'Caribbean Dancer' isn't looking so good either, all of a sudden: Prior to this

I am having a serious headache right now (Saturday night), for the second night in a row. Consequently, I have to phone it in today. On the plus side, the internet situation appears to be resolved, so if I ever do have a night where I don't have a headache, I should be able to write and save posts again. That should be a welcome change from writing posts but not being able to save them because

Internet access difficulties continue. This is a photo of Sheba in a field of alfalfa (Medicago sativa).UPDATE: Well, maybe they continue. We FINALLY got someone to come check things out on Friday afternoon, and the solution was to add a separate line strictly for the internet (previously the phone and internet had been sharing the same line, is my understanding). So it might be that my long

I enjoyed having some time off from the blog, though the time was not necessarily wonderful. We still don't have, as of Thursday morning, a consistent internet connection, though the husband did finally convince Iowa Telcom to agree to send a technician out to look at the situation, after three weeks of calling them about it. When are they sending him/r? We do not know. Will s/he let us know s/

Summer hiatus this year is exceptionally well-timed; we've been having post-ISP-switching problems where the line into the house is not able to carry as much information as I am capable of requesting. So, periodically, the line throws a tantrum and then I can't load any pages at all. And there appear to be other problems as well. Which is all really annoying. We're going to get it fixed. In

(This is Part II of the Ananas comosus profile, which covers how to grow one indoors. For historical, botanical, cultural, and scientific information about this plant, plus some statistically better-than-average jokes, see Part I.)I've attempted to grow Ananas indoors three times, and only one has worked out at all. The one that worked out was a cultivar called 'Mongo,'1 which we got in where I

I'm realizing that I should probably take more Nina pictures soonish; I don't have many that you haven't already seen. The main reason I don't take pictures of her more often is that the sides of the tank need to be cleaned, and the dead plants removed, and the living plants cleaned up, and this is all work that I never find time for. Sheba, on the other hand, is a lot newer, a lot more intrusive

I don't really get the name on this one. I mean, there are plants that already have the name "spider lily," and they don't look anything like this. So I'm not sure what the orchid-namer was trying to get away with here, but I am not fooled.It does at least have going for it that it's different from the other Dendrobiums I've seen. I mean, not that those are bad, but I approve of trying to

(This is Part I of the Ananas comosus profile, which has all the good jokes and historical information but nothing about how to grow one indoors. If you're interested in care information, and want to skip over all the jokes and culture and jokes about culture, jump to Part II.) I've had second thoughts about going with Carmen Miranda for this profile. I mean, I've done profiles involving other

I'm writing this on Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday hasn't been great so far. I woke up while having a dream in which a hairdresser was being really rude to me because I couldn't pay $60 for a haircut (Yes, even my subconscious is on my case about what a loser I am. Though, really, it's my subconscious's fault for taking me someplace pricey in the first place: it knows as well as I do that we don't

So, a couple months ago, on April 1, I posted a question for the hive mind regarding this plant:Well, they've grown a lot since then, and I think we need to revisit the ID, because it looks decidedly unlike either of the guesses I got at the time (which were tansy, Tanacetum vulgare, and Queen Anne's lace, Daucus carota). I'm thinking poison hemlock, Conium maculatum, maybe?Close-up on the flower

So it's Lilium season again. A couple of the Hemerocallis (day lilies) are beginning to bloom too, but mostly what I've been noticing are the Asiatics. Which would be hard to ignore even if I wanted to. (It's possible that some of these are not Asiatic lilies, but lilies of some other type. I don't claim to be a lily Ph.D.) I'm especially fond of the red and white NOID, first in line below.

Brown is a pretty unusual color for a living plant, though it's such a common color for dead ones that one wonders why more living plants don't try it, for the camouflage.This is a particularly tough category, so some of these are a stretch, and others aren't a stretch but the pictures don't show it well. If anybody has some recommendations for brown-leaved plants that I've left out, I'd be happy

Aside from Sheba not vomiting on last Saturday's trip to Iowa City, and a new cricket delivery for Nina, not a lot has happened here in the last week, as far as the pets are concerned. Sheba not vomiting is, of course, wonderful news, and the gaps between pukes seem to be getting longer, so we're pleased about that. Nina's cricket delivery is directly relevant only to Nina, who was more or less

This sort of goes along with yesterday's post. My Aeschynanthus is flowering a little late, compared to what I'd expect. Not that there wouldn't necessarily be flowers on them in June, normally, but this is the first set of flowers -- I'd think the last flowers would be the ones showing up now. Instead it looks like two sets of buds will follow, perhaps more, so this could still be blooming in

There are those purists who would object to a verbascum (even a dainty one like this) in a rock garden. There are those who regard all mulleins as noxious weeds. There are a lot of silly people in the world. Last year was the year of the Verbascum at my Quince St. Garden...I kinda overdid it. This year I edited the vast majority of seedlings when they were small. Instead of two or three hundred, we probably only have fitty or so here and there: nothing too radical. I think the only plant that gets more commens in my garden than the mulleins is Anthriscus sylvetris 'Ravenswing'. Although, I confess, with the tall bearded iris are in bloom, or the peonies, people do gawk. And of course there's Glaucium , a whole different story! As for mulleins, I really can't have enough kinds. And miniature hybrids or sports like this one are all the more beguiling.

I was sort of under the impression that Salvia elegans bloomed at the end of the summer or beginning of fall, and if overwintered in a greenhouse or indoors, maybe sporadically through the winter as well. But these plants, grown from cuttings over last fall and winter, have been blooming more and more and more since about the beginning of May. I enjoy it, but it also confuses me. Was everything

Collierara is a multigeneric hybrid in the Cattleya Alliance.1 Three of the genera involved, Brassavola, Cattleya, and Laelia, are pretty ordinary -- everything has them in it -- but then there's a new one: Caularthron, which sounds less like a flower and more like someone from Greek mythology. Good old star-eyed Caularthron, people would say. Shame about that thing with Poseidon.Judging from the

I've struggled for years to grow Aquilegia scopulorum , and finally this year it grew and bloomed marvellously. Of course, so did they prosper for all my friends. In the top picture a fine clump is blossoming on Jon Lawyer's exquisite crevice garden. Below it's blooming away for Bill Adams, owner of Sunscapes, in Pueblo. Botanists are tempted to lump this into our Colorado columbine, but it must surely represent an ancient (and stable) intermediate between A. jonesii and A. caerulea. As you would expect of something of hybrid ancestry, it is enormously variable: I remember climbing to tundra on a central Nevada peak and finding hundreds of them growing soboliferously on a slope, in every pastel shade with white petals. And I recall the tiny, deep blue gems on a high, limestone scree on the Aquarius plateau. Something about this spring has inspired our cultivated specimens to grow and bloom like crazy and set heavy seed (notice the pods on the plant in the lower picture)...

On Sunday morning when I came home from walking Sheba, I found these at the back door. What we have is thirteen tagged, ziplocked tomato seedlings, which is already pretty impressive, but then also there was a separate ziplock baggie containing xeroxes of six seed packages, so I know that I have Cherokee Purple, Mortgage Lifter (Halladay's), Tommy Toe, Green Grape, Eva Purple Ball, and German

Several tulips are in contention to be the last to bloom in the garden, but in my experience, Tulipa sprengeri takes the prize. It has lots going for it: although tulips seem to have perfected the color red, few plants seem to have as laquered and shiny of Chinese red flowers as this amazing species. Don't bother looking for it in catalogs: it eschews the conventional methods of cultivation used in Holland. This is one to get by getting a handful of seeds from a friend and scattering them hither and yon. It seems to grow wherever you put it. These came from my late friend John Worman, who gave me an envelope of seed from his garden almost 30 years ago. They have been prospering in the Rock Alpine Garden ever since (still blooming on June 7!). I have scattered them in my old and new gardens, and they have popped up in shady beds, rich borders and in bluegramma lawns, growing as lustily in shade as in full sun. I have read that this is extinct in the wild. I somehow hope some of th...

I was sort of shocked to see these for sale at Lowe's in Cedar Rapids (red one) and Coralville (orange one), because . . . well, because I really love Alstroemerias as cut flowers (I have some particularly vivid positive memories involving them, plus they last a remarkably long time.), and it seemed like surely if people were growing them around here, I would have seen and noticed them a long

Pretty much everything is a walkaway for me recently, because of the price, the size, or both. For most of these, the opportunity to buy is not yet over, so it's possible some of these could still be mine, but . . . well, I accumulated a lot of the plants I have already with the intention of selling or trading them away at some point, and that hasn't been going so well. (I mean, it's not going

Not a particularly interesting week for Sheba or Nina. Nina never has interesting weeks, as far as I can tell (though it's not like she has especially boring ones, either: I imagine Nina's inner emotional life is very, you know, zen), and the most notable event to happen to Sheba involved her slipping backwards out of her harness while I was taking pictures of weeds along the side of the street,

We went to Iowa City on Wednesday, and I took lots and lots of pictures of various things, which is cool, because it means I won't have to worry about possible things to blog about for a really long time, but it also means that I won't have time to write about those things because I will be so busy sorting pictures. (Seriously. The present estimate is that I have a backlog of ~1700 photos to

It's hard to believe there was a time when we thought Lewisia cotyledon was a challenging alpine. Nowadays you can find it sold occasinally at box stores and even rarely at grocery stores even, and finding it in a garden center is no great feat. Yet there was a time when this local endemic of the Siskiyou mountains was coveted and yearned for by gardeners. The two plants in the lower of the two pix above are growing at the fringe of my dry garden, where they rarely get a drink of water. The red one above is at Denver Botanic Gardens. The secret, of course, of growing this Lewisia is to grow tons of them from seed, plant them everywhere, and keep propagating them: single plants usually only last a few years, and you never want to be without this gem. I remember finally getting to Vincent Square a decade or so ago, where the Royal Horticultural Society still held its fortnightly flower show in a cavernous, Victorian hall the size of a football field. Although massive, the dingy se...

As noted a couple weeks ago, my Hoya bella has decided, after a couple years, to give me some flowers. When I first noticed this, I saw two sets of buds; now there are at least four, which is pretty cool. The first set of flowers opened a couple days ago, and, well, they're pretty Hoya-ish ---- which is okay, but I'd thought maybe there'd be a weirder shape or color or something. The rumors that

This is the flip side of the list I posted on May 27, which was about easy plants I recommended for beginning growers of houseplants. These are the ones that are fairly easy to get (usually a little less common than the easy ones; it depends where you shop), but are not good prospects for growing year-round indoors. There are a number of reasons why this could be the case. Some of the plants on

Do we really need another white flowering shrub that blooms in May and June? Albeit this one can grow in Colorado with no summer watering. The name is intriguing: Atraphaxis buxifolia . It sounds to me more like a Persian satrap's name than a plant. We grow several accessions of this genus at Denver Botanic Gardens, although the monster above is on East Ridge at my Quince St. garden blooming several weeks ago. The second picture shows what it looks like almost a month later from the same spot (the magic of gardens is their changeability after all)...full disclosure: there is a certain little down side to the plant. It stinks. Literally: a strange scent somewhere between rancid and down right pungent. I planted it fifteen or more feet from the nearest path, but the scent still wafts along. During my garden open day the stiff breeze saved the several hundred visitors from staring at one another and wondering who hadn't showered...small compensation for stiff breezes--when you wan...

Today (Tuesday), I may be getting rid of some of my duplicate plants, in a semi-wholesale kind of way, but I'm writing this on Monday night and so I don't know whether it's going to happen or not. If it does happen, then I get money and space, both of which would be really pleasant things to have, but if it doesn't, then I'm stuck here being depressed and irritable and questioning my life