Indoor Plant Care Tips Guide

The plants are coming in for the winter, and I've got a gigantic backlog of photos to deal with, so it's time for transmitted light pictures again. (The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.) Cissus rhombifolia. Rotate it 90 degrees clockwise and there's a (subtle) peace sign! Euonymous alatus, autumn. Well. It's certainly very red, isn't it? Ficus elastica 'Burgundy,' dying

I will get back to Sheba eventually, I promise. But first: a report on the state of the local wildlife. I usually get one hummingbird sighting every year, and that happened earlier this week. It flew away before I could adjust the camera settings, but the pictures would have been shaky blurs photographed from a distance anyway, so you're not missing much. However, I have a picture of a

Oh, Mr. Subjunctive, you silly goose, why do you have to be so negative all the time? Why phrase it as "plants I'm not currently mad at," instead of "plants I love," or "plants that are doing well," or something along those lines? That's . . . a really good question. I'm pretty sure some of it is just that I'm a relentlessly negative person.1 And there's also the issue that lots of other blogs

Am I getting used to my LCD monitor, or is this two not-bad pictures in a row? A good background really does make a huge difference. Paphiopedilum Lady Isabel = Paphiopedilum rothschildianum x Paphiopedilum stonei

I hear they're not particularly satisfying houseplants, in the long-term, but I do sometimes feel mildly bad about never having tried an Aphelandra squarrosa. This one was at the ex-job, quite a while ago. I'm not sure exactly why I feel like I should have attempted it -- it's not as though there's a list of Houseplants You Must Try If You're Going To Be Into Houseplants. (And if there were

I got this plant from a reader (who can choose to reveal him/rself in the comments if s/he wants to), in the form of tubers that were just beginning to break dormancy, and it's been a very up-and-down kind of emotional experience thus far. It grew fine throughout the early summer, and produced its first bloom in mid-August. (17 August.) Which was nice. And even the buds are kind of attractive

Leuchtenbergia principis is a lonely guy. For one thing, it's the only species in the genus Leuchtenbergia, what botanists call a monotypic species.1 For another, in its native habitat (pretty much everything in the northern half of Mexico, except the coasts), it's typically found as single individuals, often growing next to a clump of Agaves and tall grass. (I guess they're not comfortable in

This photo is the first orchid picture in quite a while that I thought turned out well, so I feel like I ought to write something about it, but it kind of speaks for itself, so I'm not sure what to say. I'm not crazy about the whole ruffly frilly Cattleya thing, but those colors! So pretty! Rhyncholaeliocattleya Dick Smith 'Aloha Spirit' = Rhyncholaeliocattleya Hisako Akatsuka x

I am pleased to report that there has been a breakthrough in the whole camera-uploading-photos-to-dumb-locations business. The overall situation is still not great, alas, but that much has been settled, and this gives us hope for the future. Except where it comes to the scale-and-caterpillar part of the future, because my optimism has limits. I do, at least, now have pictures of one of the

Hi again. Whatever you might have heard, I have not run off to Ecuador with everybody's donations. (I don't even speak Ecuadorian.) What's happened instead has been sort of a perfect storm of blogular interference. � As I've mentioned before, my computer has been essentially out of memory for a few months, so it's been difficult to get photos to post to the blog. � But -- I've gotten a new

Odontocidium Sunlight 'Pacific Sunset' = Oncidium Mexico � Odontocidium Crowborough, though the orchid registry online doesn't know of the cross, so it's not clear how official this is.

Still working on the Leuchtenbergia profile; things keep coming up and preventing me from getting as far on it as I would like. I'm hoping to finish by the end of this week. Meanwhile, I felt bad for going so long between posts, so there's this. I've had Codonanthe serrulata since May 2011, when I got three cuttings from a reader. It didn't look particularly promising. And it's still not my

Yeah, okay, so clearly the Leuchtenbergia profile didn't happen yesterday, either. Whoops. I've been trying to take yearbook pictures this week, which involves lots of sweating and lifting. And then it got cold at night on Monday and Tuesday so I had to move some plants inside for the evening and then back out again in the morning, which also involved some sweating and lifting. And then we made a

Thanks to the generosity of four readers, I now have enough money to buy an entire used computer, and get most of a dental checkup/cleaning. So that's good. (More than just "good," really -- both of those things have been nagging small worries in the back of my mind for a long time, then in the last month or so became screaming huge worries directly in front of my face, so that's a couple fewer

In my previous post, I said would not be posting over the weekend, because I was trying to get a special post ready for today. But I have failed. Some of the problem is that I have almost filled up the memory of my eleven-year-old computer (37.2 GB capacity, 1.51 GB remaining), which makes photo-editing more complicated and time-consuming, for reasons I predict you will not care about. The