All Praise the Common Houseplant

All Praise the Common Houseplant

 “All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray…”

California Dreaming, John Phillips and Michelle Phillips

The winter of 2017-2018 will be remembered as the one when the leaves forgot to fall from the trees.  It wasn’t the trees’ fault, of course, it was a combination of a too-warm October coupled with copious rain that caused trees to produce too little of the chemical that tells leaves it’s time to decamp for their golden future as compost.  As a result, the view out my window, since early November, has been a sad blend of browns and grays.  Welcome to winter in eastern Massachusetts, a condition that will persist in some variation for the next three months.

Which is why this essay is all about houseplants and why they’re treasured in this household. 

This croton - now more
than a decade old -
tolerates winter's low
sunlight yet provides
glorious color

I grew up with year-round outdoor greenery and flowers.  Nominally, I appreciated that subtropical splendor.  In reality, it was part of a background that I took for granted and too often found inconvenient.  When periodically ordered to cut back the hibiscus hedge or grub out the aracea palms that were spreading into the lawn, I piled imaginary term papers on top of one another as excuses not to sully my hands with such chores (to no avail, of course).

This morning, I marveled at our multiple crotons (formally, Codiaeum variegatum) that provide a rainbow of reds, yellows and greens in each leaf, yet tolerate the weak light of January and February.  Back in Florida, they were just one more thing on my to-do list of plants to be clipped back before they overflowed onto the sun porch. 

There are cultivars of begonias in many rooms, each an adventure to be appreciated.  A Rex Begonia 'Paso Doble’ that bloomed prolifically on our screened porch all summer still provides a wonderful palette of reds and pinks in its leaves as it brightens our bedroom.  How many plants can make that claim?

This Rex Begonia 'Paso Doble' spent
its summer on our screened porch.  It
has made the transition to indoors.

A houseplant need not be exotic, or even in bloom, to provide visual enjoyment.  Ferns occupy ledges and shelves in several rooms.  A single peace lily (Spathiphyllum) received as gift a decade ago has begat dozens of offspring that populate not only our own home but those of friends. They are cheerfully green the year round.  This time of year, their regal white flowers – plain by the standards set by many other plants – are welcome additions to rooms’ color. 

We purchase houseplants that appeal to us.  Some have lofty pedigrees from famous nurseries.  Others are commoners. There is a kalanchoe next to me as this is written. It is one of the most ordinary of houseplants, yet it is budding up in yellow for its umpteenth annual display of winter color atop leather-tough, dark-green leaves.

A simple fern provides a spot of
color amid a gloomy backdrop

A few of our plants are snowbirds.  The cyclamen in our kitchen window spent six months last year planted in our garden, where it strengthened its root system and bulb even as its foliage needed to be shaded from the sun.  Dug in October, it is now in the early stage of a winter bloom of majestic purple.   Thanks to tissue cultures, the availability and variety of orchids has proliferated even as their price has plummeted.  Nor are houseplants necessarily greedy.  Philodendron and cacti seem to thrive with minimal attention (a Sanseveria trifoliate, better known as ‘Mother-in-Law’s tongue’, survived in my Aunt Virginia's house for decades with little more than periodic dusting).

We have more than thirty houseplants this winter, a happy mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary.  There is no rhyme or reason to what we have.  Each plant came to us through serendipity; each remains because it has thrived in our home.

Me, in a warmer clime, avoiding
trimming back the hibiscus

I don’t often offer unsolicited advice, but here is some:  if you're here in New England or some place with a 'real' winter, this weekend, take a trip to a nursery with a selection of blooming houseplants.  If one (or more) strikes your fancy, take it home with you. 

And, if you happen to be reading this from a subtropical climate, stop complaining and go out and trim back the hibiscus like you were told to.

The Huddled Masses, Leaning Toward the Sun

They are camped out around our home, unwilling refugees, far from their tropical and subtropical origins, gathered by windows and leaning toward a feeble sun for sustenance. They huddle together to preserve precious water in a house where the humidity is in single digits. 

With its east and south-facing windows, our library
is a favored spot for wintering houseplants

What we do to our houseplants. We take growing things whose ancestors never experienced a frost and transport them to environments where, for six months of the year, all that separates them from death by frozen capillaries is a pane of glass. And all this for…. What?

Why do we have houseplants? I typed that question into Google, ordinarily a bastion of reason and well-marshaled information. The first response was a query right back at me: ‘How can I get rid of gnats?’ Not ready for a Socratic dialog so early in the morning, I declined to provide an answer. Five pages of scrolling later, I had not found any erudite responses from horticulturally-inclined sociologists, although I uncovered an online survey indicating that our home’s houseplant population puts us dangerously outside the bell curve (the average number is five).

One of our 'guest' orchids.  It hogs
two windows in my office.

And so, I am left to come up with my own answers. The first one is obvious: they’re green and they sometimes flower. It’s February in New England.  The world outside my window this week is relentlessly brown. Who wouldn’t want to have something nearby that reminded us that winter is not some Game-of-Thrones-style permanent condition?

Another answer is that houseplants are undemanding. Water them once a week. Check them for insects (including, yes, gnats). Re-pot them once a year. Compared to your average pet, they’re self-sufficient. My aunt kept a snake plant (Sansevieria trifasciata) in a darkened hallway that, to the best of my knowledge, was never watered, only dusted occasionally. It lived for decades.

A wintering bougainvillea and an
array of plants in Betty's office.

A third answer is that houseplants are your friends.  We have deployed a small army of Peace lilies (Spathiphyllum) around our home.  They not only produce a handsome, long-lived flower, but they also cleanse the air of multiple toxins.  Many other houseplants perform similar functions.

Plants can surprise you. We have friends who have decamped for South America for a lengthy vacation.  We agreed to ‘babysit’ two of their orchids.  Our friends arrived for dinner in late December bearing the two biggest plants I have seen outside a botanical garden.  For two weeks, those orchids simply occupied space in our home; one of them hogging an entire twin set of casement windows.  They were nothing but greenery.  Then, one morning two weeks into our plant-sitting exercise, we awakened to find our guests in spectacular blooms of pink and white.  They’re still brightening our home and are welcome to stay as long as they wish.

This croton has been
with us for two
decades.

Finally, plants get to become family. We have two wonderfully colorful crotons that has been around so long they are practically family retainers.  Our various bougainvillea have been in residence for so many years that I can predict their flowering cycles to within a few days. Betty was given a ‘bunny ears’ cactus (Opuntia microdasys) almost a decade ago.  Every year, it rewarded us with a new ‘ear’, growing like an oblong floor of an oddly-shaped building.  When the cactus broke over under its own weight, Betty thought it might be a goner.  Instead, the area from which it broke produced two ears, each of which is now happily adding to the plant’s bulk.

So, why do we have houseplants?  I think it’s because they’re a year-round reminder that, no matter our station in life, we all ultimately came from the land.  A few generations ago, our forebears farmed to survive.  Today, we exchange our labor for money and, if we ‘farm’ at all, we call it ‘gardening’ and we do it for pleasure.  In short, houseplants keep us rooted.

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.

In Praise of Houseplants

“All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray…”

California Dreaming, John Phillips and Michelle Phillips

A fast-moving storm last week dropped seven inches of snow on my home, turning white a landscape that has been, since early November, a sad blend of browns and grays.  Welcome to winter in eastern Massachusetts, a condition that will persist in some variation for the next three months.

Which is why this first entry of the new year  is all about houseplants and why they’re treasured in this household. 

I grew up with year-round outdoor greenery and flowers.  Nominally, I appreciated that subtropical splendor.  In reality, it was part of a background that I took for granted and often found inconvenient.  When periodically ordered to cut back the hibiscus hedge or grub out the aracea palms that were spreading into the lawn, I piled imaginary term papers on top of one another as excuses not to sully my hands with such chores.

Burbidgea 'Golden Brush'

This morning, by contrast, I marveled at a Burbidgea scheizochella ‘Golden Brush’ that has sent up a strikingly attractive flower.  It grows in our Great Room where there is abundant light even in January.  Multiple crotons (formally, Codiaeum variegatum) provide a rainbow of reds, yellows and greens in each leaf.  There are cultivars of begonias in many rooms, each an adventure to be appreciated. 

One of our crotons, and a
neomarica that will bloom
in February and March

These plants need not be exotic, or even in bloom, to provide visual enjoyment.  Ferns occupy ledges and shelves in several rooms.  A single peace lily (Spathiphyllum) received as gift many years ago has begat half a dozen offspring. They are cheerfully green the year round.  This time of year, their regal white flowers – plain by the standards set by many other plants – are welcome additions to rooms’ color. 

We purchase houseplants that appeal to us.  Some, we encounter in visits to nurseries and garden centers.  Others beckon us through the mail.  The cover of Logee’s winter catalog featured a glorious Calathea unlike any we had ever seen.  The photo of that plant coupled with a dozen other candidates prompted us to take a Saturday morning trip to Daniels, Connecticut, last month to inspect the goods.  Calathea ‘Holiday’ is now blooming in our living room, one of half a dozen new specimens that are now part of our collection.  It joins another recent arrival, a compact Euphorbia ‘Salmon’ from White Flower Farm, that is already resplendent with flowers that should continue through the winter months.

An orchid and a potted palm
add a touch of the tropics

Winter color need not come only from exotic specimens.  Colorful cyclamen can enliven a home just as well as orchids (and, thanks to tissue cultures, the availability and variety of orchids has proliferated even as their price has plummeted).  Nor are houseplants necessarily greedy.  Philodendron and cacti seem to thrive with minimal attention (a Sanseveria trifoliate, better known as ‘Mother-in-Law’s tongue’, survived in my Aunt Virginia's house for decades with little more than periodic dusting).

In Betty's office, a kalanchoe
and a bouganviella 'Coconut
Ice' are both about to bloom.

We have more than sixty houseplants in all, a happy mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary.  There is no rhyme or reason to what we have.  Each plant came to us through serendipity; each remains because it has thrived in our home.

I don’t often offer unsolicited advice, but here is some:  if you're reading this from a land with 'real' winter, this weekend, take a trip to a nursery with a selection of blooming houseplants.  If one (or more) strikes your fancy, take it home with you. 

 

And, if you live in a subtropical climate, stop complaining and go out and trim back the hibiscus.

Walkin' Miracles

We have been growing Neomarica as houseplants for at least a dozen years.  Our first one came as a gift and, to the best of my knowledge, the 100+ specimens we have given away have all been offspring of that first one in its three-inch pot.  Neomarica is a tropical plant, a member of the Iridaceae family (iris to us mere mortals).  Each plant puts up dozens of thin iris-live leaves from a thick rhizome but some of those leaves are flower stalks in disguise. 



Neomarica, in its brief hours of glory

 For 350 days a year, Neomarica is a snoozer of a houseplant.  In fact, to be both unkind but entirely accurate, its sole benefits are that it is green and requires little care.  But then, for two weeks a year at the end of winter, something wonderful happens.  A couple of those leaves begin to swell near their tips.  And then, miracle of miracles, little flower buds appear and then open to form a stunning and complex flower.

Look fast, though.  The flower you see open when you get up in the morning will already be flagging by late afternoon.  Overnight, it folds back into itself and, by morning, it's a little ball of brown mud.

But then, lo and behold, another bud swells up from the same stem and there's another day of beauty.  And then a second stem gets into the action and third.  For about a week, you get to play this marvelous game of guessing how many flowers will be open this morning - five?  six?  eight?  One morning, an especially thick clump had a total of 14 flowers open all at once.

Just as quickly, however, bud production falls.  A few days later you're back to sporadic bloom here and there and, a week later, there's one or two laggards as the stem is spent.  Then.... it's back to being green background scenery.

350 days a year, it's green
background scenery; but for
two weeks at the end of
winter, it's glorious.

Neomarica has one more trick up its sleeve.  After the last stem has produced its last flower, it bends over as though it had been to the maternity ward one too many times.  The stem lays down on the ground if it's in the tropics.  If it is in your home, you need to get a little pot and some potting mix, and steer that poor, tired stalk toward your pot.  In a few weeks, it will root.  And, a few weeks after that, the rooting is putting up a new crop of leaves.  When that happens outdoors, the plant is growing by 'walking', hence the name 'Walking Iris'.  When it happens indoors, it's an opportunity.

We have rooted upward of 15 pots each year of Neomarica this way.  An established pot can also be readily divided into half a dozen plants after a year.  Those pots go with her when she gives presentations on houseplant care to garden clubs.  They're always a hit.  And, perhaps one of them will be given as a gift to a friend, who will watch it grow, see it flower, and put out a pot...

The Huddled Masses

They are camped out around my home, at least 80 refugees, far from their subtropical origins, gathered by windows and leaning toward a feeble sun for sustenance. They huddle together to preserve precious water in a house where the humidity is in single digits.
What we do to our houseplants. We take growing things whose ancestors never experienced a frost and transport them to environments where, for six months of the year, all that separates them from death by frozen capillaries is a pane of glass. And all this for…. What?

There are more that 80 houseplants
in my home, clustered around
windows.  Here are 15 of them.

Why do we have houseplants? I typed that question into Google, ordinarily a bastion of reason and well-marshaled information. The first response was a query right back at me: ‘How can I get rid of gnats?’ Not ready for a Socratic dialog so early in the morning, I declined to provide an answer. Five pages of scrolling later, I had not found any erudite answers from horticulturally-inclined sociologists, although I uncovered an online survey indicating that our 80+ population of plants puts us dangerously outside the bell curve (the average number is five).

And so, I am left to come up with my own answers. The first one is obvious: they’re green and they sometimes flower. It’s February in New England. There is more than two feet of snow on the ground. Who wouldn’t want to have something nearby that reminded us that winter is not a permanent condition?

Another answer is that houseplants are undemanding. Water them once a week. Check them for insects (including, yes, gnats). Re-pot them once a year. Compared to a pet, they’re self-sufficient. My aunt kept a snake plant (Sansevieria trifasciata) in a darkened hallway that, to the best of my knowledge, was never watered, only dusted occasionally. It lived for decades.

Plants can surprise you. My wife received a lipstick plant (Aeschynanthus ‘Rigel”) as part of a plant challenge. She nurtured it for three months but, once the challenge was over, put it in a plant rack where it was promptly forgotten about. This winter, it has started flowering. Not spectacularly and not prolifically. But every week another bright red bloom appears.

Plants also respond to pampering. I cannot walk by a display of orchids without pouting like a six-year-old that “I want one”. And so our home is filled with dendrobium and phalaenopsis specimens. They bloom for several months, then the flowers wilt and the stems turn brown. The plants go onto a lower rack away from the prime sun locations. Then, one day something magical happens: a new stem forms and, over the course of a month, bud nodes appear. The orchid gets tender, loving care: swabbed with alcohol to rid it of pests and placed in a location with perfect, filtered light. A few weeks later, the flowers begin to open.

Neomarica's blooms last just one
day and the plant does nothing
but take up space 50 weeks of the year.
But those two weeks of flowers
make up for the freeloading.

Finally, plants get to become family. Last month I wrote about a cyclamen that has been around so long it is practically a family retainer. Our various bougainvillea have been in residence for so many years that I can predict their flowering cycles to within a few days. As this is written, the buds are starting to swell on our walking iris (neomarica), a plant that freeloads around the house for 50 weeks each year before earning its keep in a spectacular succession of blooms, each lasting just a single day.

Hooray for Cyclamen!

Outside my window this afternoon is a world of white – a product of the Boxing Day Blizzard - punctuated by a dismal oak tree that for reasons outside of my understanding, hangs onto its limp, brown leaves.


Fortunately, indoors, I have a cacophony of never-ending color. Thank goodness for cyclamen.

Cyclamen, along with orchids and a few other tropicals, are the bright spots of a cold winter. If I may allowed a moment of anthropomorphism, they’re perky little plants that cheer me on as winter hunkers down and gets entrenched in New England.

The cyclamen that greet me each morning

If you don’t know cyclamen, head to your nearest garden center and get acquainted. They’re a European import that is more than welcome in any home. They produce prolific white, pink and purple flowers all winter long; seldom seem bothered by disease, and thrive indoors with little more than watering. Their leaves are a marvel of plant biology: a veritable roadmap on each one etched in green, black and white. We keep a clutch of cyclamen in our master bathroom where they greet us each morning. There are other groupings around the house, where ever there is a splash of sunlight and a welcome need for color.

They’re also durable. By April, their energy is spent (but by then, the first spring bulbs are up) and we consign our dozen or so cyclamen to the basement for six weeks of rest. Then, in mid-May, we un-pot them and plant them in out-of-the-way, shady spots in the garden. There, the bulbs (technically speaking, corms) gather strength and produce a few leaves. Before the first frost, we gently dig them up, re-pot them with a loose potting mix, and find them a window with good, filtered light. By the time Thanksgiving has passed, they’re back in flower. In case you think this migration is hard on the plants, we have one cyclamen that has made the pot-to-earth transition for considerably longer than a decade and is going strong.

Orchids are another winter pleaser. They’ve come a very long way in the past decade. Once orchids were rare, temperamental and outlandishly expensive. Today, tissue culture technology has made them readily available, especially phalaenopsis and dendrobium which adapt well to growing in homes. Ours occupy a tray in our upstairs hallway where a southeast-facing set of windows provide all-day light. We provide the moisture they need by resting the orchid pots on trays filled with a thin layer of pea gravel and water.

Orchids require more care than cyclamen. They need a reasonable amount of air circulation and higher humidity than most homes can provide in winter. They’re prone to spider mites, scale and aphids and so need to be watched (a little alcohol or soapy water is the best medicine). But the payoff is worth the effort: months of spectacular flowers on spikes and, miracle of miracles, re-blooms on plants that have been allowed to rest and gather energy.

The croton with its own skylight

My other, personal favorite winter plant is the croton. Its colorful, glossy tropical foliage can only be called gaudy when you see it in summer. In the winter, with all that miserable snow outside, it’s a bit of heavenly eye candy. I grew up in Florida with masses of crotons outside my bedroom window and I never appreciated them because “they didn’t bloom”. Well, I’ve learned my lesson. There are two in our home, both several feet high and I cherish their cacophony of color. All that’s missing is a mynah bird cawing in the distance.

Crotons want even moisture and lots of light. Ours have a skylight all to themselves and they reward us with a bountiful display of leaves. Yes, just leaves; but they’re red and yellow and dark green and gold and no two are alike. They make winter a little more bearable.

And, isn’t that what houseplants are for?