Houseplants to the Rescue

There is snow falling heavily outside as this is written.  The wind chill is well below zero and gale-force gusts are forecast overnight.  Inside, though, there’s a date palm in fruit; orchids in bloom; and a croton with splashy red, gold and yellow leaves.

Welcome to winter in my home, where houseplants are king for a season.

One of the greenhouses at
the Lyman Estate

It is, of course, possible to see stunning displays of flowers and greenery in mid-winter.  Here in eastern Massachusetts, Wellesley College has a wonderful complex of greenhouses open to the public as does the Lyman Estate in Waltham.  I'm certain there's a comparable indoor garden near you, whereever you live.  But visiting those indoor gardens requires getting in a car and driving, and the pleasure is just for an hour or so.  By all means, go see those places, but why not stop in at your local garden center on your way home and start your own collection?

That’s what we did several decades ago.  It started with the usual suspects: a hibiscus and a ficus tree.  Then we added a bougainvillea or two.  Or three.  We bought a peace lily (spathiphyllum) which grew and was divided.  Each division doubled in size and was then divided yet again.  Today, we force them on guests. 

Dracaena 'Lemon
Surprise' - one of our
houseplants

Our houseplants are family; they’ve followed us around the country.  When we move, one car or truck driven by one of us and dedicated to ensuring that every plant arrives undamaged.  Moreover, every houseplant has a history: it came from a road trip to Logee’s in Connecticut or by mail from White Flower Farm.  We bought it at the flower show or it came via a garden club plant swap.  It was a gift from a friend or there was an end-of-season sale at Mahoney’s or Weston Nurseries.

For seven months of the year, our houseplants get fed, watered, re-potted, rotated indoors and out, and generally pampered.  We take such good care of them when the outdoors is filled with blooming things in order to toughen them up for times like these.  From mid-October until the end of April, they will be continually stressed by low light levels, extremely low humidity and drafts.  Moreover, any hint of an insect infestation can send a plant into a quarantine from which there is often no return.

Two of the four
bougainvillea that keep
me company while I work

To me, houseplants are a form of rescue: a lifeline to a world of beauty when the outdoors is inhospitable.  I grew up with tropicals, which perhaps starts to explain my affinity for them as an adult.  I wake up to a cheerful variegated philodendron and a jasmine that is starting its bloom cycle.  We eat breakfast to a collection of succulents that grow in exotic shapes and textures.  I do my work in an office flanked by a pair of bougainvillea that will flower pink and yellow next month. 

By April, we’ll have landscapes of early bulbs to admire. Come May, we’ll all be enchanted by annuals and perennials, more bulbs and flowering trees.  For the next three months, it will be the houseplants that keep me sane.  They continually remind me that, even in New England, gardening is a year-round avocation.

The Joy of Discovery

For plant enthusiasts, catalogs – both their print and on-line incarnations – are wonderful shopping tools.  You can see a plant, get a good idea of its needs and habits, and determine whether it will fit into your home or garden.  But even the best catalogs are imperfect substitutes for physically picking up a plant, examining it, and choosing the one that has your idea of the right number of leaves, buds or branches. 

You walk in looking for one plant,
only to be beguiled by its neighbor.

To get the perfect plant, you have to go to the source.  And, occasionally when you do, something wonderful happens.  You go off in search of a great specimen of Begonia ‘Cracklin Rosie’ which caught your eye in the catalog but sitting next to it is Begonia ‘Curly Fireflush’.  You look into the deeply spiraled chartreuse and chocolate leaves of ‘Curly Fireflush’ and you say, ‘wow’.  Then, you see the fine red hairs on the leaves and you know that this plant is going home with you.

The facade of Logee's retail store.
It tells you nothing about what's inside.

Last Saturday, Betty and I set off on just such an exploration.  It was a beautiful day in southern New England; still uncharacteristically mild for early December.  Our destination was Logee’s Greenhouse in Daniels, Connecticut.  Logee’s is exactly sixty miles from our home and getting to Daniels takes us through some very pretty countryside. 

As I wrote in my last entry, Logee’s has one of the more compelling catalogs in the business.  But, like even the best businesses, what you see in the catalog is just a snapshot in time, and is limited by marketing realities.  For example, if you have only three of something to sell, putting it in a catalog makes no economic sense.  Or, if you’re not certain something can be shipped safely, it’s best to omit it. 

Before I go further, a few words about Logee’s.  The business was founded in 1892.  In 1900, William Logee ordered a Ponderosa Lemon tree and planted it in his greenhouse.  The Ponderosa Lemon is still there, 112 years old, bearing fruit like crazy and occupying several hundred cubic feet of greenhouse space.  I relate that story as evidence this is no ordinary, by-the-books business.  It is a distinctly, family-run business, now its third generation.  Byron Martin and Laurelynn Glass Martin are both very active in the enterprise.  Byron is the horticulturalist; Laurelynn is marketing and administration.

Logee's aisles are less than
two feet wide.

To comprehend the passion that goes into Logee’s, you need to set foot in its greenhouses.  Directly behind the ‘retail store’ is the Long House, a hundred-plus-foot-long structure that nominally houses begonias and gesneriads.  Here’s a video of what is actually growing inside it.  What the video cleverly disguises is that the two aisles down the length of the structure are less than two feet wide.  When someone wants to get by you, one of you ducks into the center greenery.  There, you may be ensconced in a thirty-foot-long bougainvillea (with two-inch-diameter trunks), jasmine vine or Glory Bower.

All along the perimeter of the Long House – as well as the Big House, Lemon Tree House, Fern House and Potting House – are the plants.  I counted 106 genera, from Aeschynanthus to Trichodiadema. How many different cultivars?  I wouldn’t venture a guess.  Each cultivar is well signed, with growing information and a detailed description.  The one drawback is that those who buy only mature plants may go away disappointed.  Much of what you find in Logee’s is in two-, three- and four-inch pots.  The assumption is that you will take the plant home, nurture it and, in a year (or two, or three), have a strapping specimen in your window.

On one side, it's a dense tangle
of greenery, with occasional
cut-throughs.

The joy is in wandering, of reading descriptions, and of letting your horticultural imagination run rampant.  We walked into Logee’s with a dozen catalog pages earmarked.  In the course of ninety minutes, we filled a box with plants, put some back and re-filled the box with others that caught our eye.  If we couldn’t find a featured plant, one of the greenhouse staff quickly located it for us.  In the end, only two of the plants we went looking for came home with us.  The balance was spontaneous decisions.  (On a down note, the Sarcoglottis sceptroides that was at the top of my list had only three specimens to choose from, none of them sufficiently tempting.  The Fragrant Jewel Orchid is now listed as being out of stock.)

Shopping in person can also have a financial benefit (in addition to saving shipping and handling charges).  We were told that if any of our purchases was a plant with a red bloom, our entire order would be 20% off.  A Clerodendrum x spectrum – already in our box – qualified our purchase for the discount.  You don’t get that kind of a happy surprise from a catalog.  And, as a note to any marketers who may be reading this and wondering if offering a 20% discount on an order a) reduces the total sale by 20%, b) causes the shopper to purchase 20% more stuff but keeping the total dollar purchase the same as it would have been without the discount, or c) causes the shopper to buy lots more stuff, thereby increasing the total value of the sale by more than the discount; the answer is most decidedly 'c'.

Logee’s is at the extreme end of the ‘Joy of Discovery’ kind of plant shopping.  You can expect no such thrill in a big box store (with endless rows of focus-group-approved plants) or at a garden center whose stock in trade is Four-Step lawn products.  But any nursery that has unusual plant devotees on its staff invariably has a section of uncommon cultivars tucked away and available for perusing.  Stop in and look around.

Fifty Shades of ....... Green

Yes, I admit it.  I had this
stashed under my bed when
I was a teenager.

Like almost every self-respecting male adolescent of my generation, I kept several copies of Playboy magazine tucked between the mattress and box spring in my bedroom.  Those well-thumbed magazines had the beneficial effect of ensuring that my bedroom was always neat and clean, so that prying adults would never stumble upon them.  My friends and I would spend hours, ummm…, reading the articles.

I mention this ancient memory because, last week, I chanced upon my wife and her friend and fellow gardener, Susan Hammond, sitting side by side at our kitchen table; so intently poring over the pages of a magazine-sized periodical that they did not hear me come in.  As they turned pages, they would say ‘Wow’ in unison and make breathless sotto voce comments about the photos on the page.

I do not normally interrupt such interludes.  My wife is entitled to her private interests and her friendships.  But after one particular joint ‘gasp’, I felt I needed to investigate.  And, unlike that one time when my mother unexpectedly came into my bedroom while I was admiring ‘The Girls of Ole Miss’, Betty and Susan did not quickly kick the publication under the kitchen table and pretend to be thumbing through a stack of 45 rpm records.

The object of my wife's affection:
Episcia 'Pink Brocade'

No, instead, they brazenly smoothed down the page so that I could see an Episcia hybrid, better known as Flame Violet ‘Pink Brocade’, a container plant with a draping leaves that mix pinks, whites, silvers and green; all interspersed with brilliant red blooms.

Welcome to what my wife’s friend jokingly calls, ‘plant pornography’.  To which Betty adds, “While everyone else is reading ‘Fifty Shades of Gray’, gardeners prefer ‘Fifty Shades of Green’.”  Each year at this time, catalogs arrive (sans brown paper wrapper) bearing photos of new and exotic plants, heavy with flowers and mixing color palettes that are the antithesis of the relentless browns in the ‘real world’ of a late autumn New England.

Logee's catalog, with the
Holiday 'Calathea' on the cover.

These catalogs come from many sources, but two that get a lot of attention in New England come from Logee’s and White Flower Farm.  Both are based in Connecticut and both are masters of both marketing and plant selection.  The cover of the Logee’s catalog features a Calathea which they have dubbed the ‘Holiday Peacock Plant’.  We have a couple of Calatheas around out house.  But ours don’t have raspberry-red flowers those promise continuous bloom once the plant reaches eighteen inches in height.  Nor does the foliage on our Calatheas have a white feathered pattern around its leaves; but this one does.

White Flower Farms is
a master of marketing.

In the White Flower Farm Holiday Catalog, Betty skips the bulbs and heads straight for the hard stuff: things like Cape Primrose ‘Blue Mars’.  Forget everything you know about primula vulgaris.  What White Flower Farm is offering may be called a ‘primrose’ but it’s a Streptocarpus, an African Violet relative that produces a profusion of voluptuous, purplish-blue flowers.

We pull Euphorbia out of our garden all summer long.  It’s a nuisance plant.  But White Flower Farm has a new hybrid called Euphorbia ‘Salmon’ that has luscious salmon-colored flowers (brachts, actually) that rise over long succulent leaves.  It even ships in a white metal cachepot.  Garden thugs never looked so good.

The Fragrant Jewel Orchid

But the winner, at least to me, is a Sarcoglottis sceptroides; the Fragrant Jewel Orchid. Even if it never bloomed, Sarcoglottis would be a winner because of its beautiful, silver-striped, spotted leaves.  But according to Logee’s, in winter and early spring, the Jewel Orchid puts up tall (up to twenty inch) flower spikes, each of which is adorned with up to twenty blooms.  And the blooms have both a spicy fragrance and turn green to gold as they age. 

Plant pornography?  Yeah.  But unlike the Girls of Ole Miss, you can bring these beauties home to stare at all winter.  And Mom not only won’t mind, she’ll be pleased.