The Inside Story on Tending Houseplants
Anyone who’s tried to grow temperamental plants, especially flowers, indoors knows how hard it can be. From the nursery to the dim windowsill to the trash, often in a matter of days.
Well, there’s help for those who’ve watched bright-green things turn into shriveled brown ones. Tovah Martin’s “Indoor Gardens” ($12.95, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998) lays it out, explaining just which plants can survive in your home and what steps can be taken to ensure they stay as healthy as when you picked them out.
Martin knows your pain; she shares your frustration.
“In a greenhouse or garden center, where all of the houseplants have been growing under ideal conditions, they are the picture of blooming health,” she said. “But unless you can duplicate those conditions, you should resist the urge to pick up the first pretty flower that catches your fancy.
“So before you pick up the pot and put your money down, you need to understand a plant’s cultural requirements and think about whether its needs will be met by the living conditions in your home.”
The most important factor, of course, is light. But even if you have a small place with few or no windows facing the sun, you can still have an indoor garden, using plants with minimal needs or setting up an artificial light source.
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Martin divides homes into categories based on which direction most windows face. There are south-facing windows (as a rule, they get the most sunlight throughout the day), east and west (the next-best, with about half a day of light) and north (the least).
Peter Gallo has it the worst, with most of the few windows in his Newport Beach apartment looking north and providing little direct light. Gallo, an elementary school teacher, said he does fine with the flowers he grows on his balcony, but a wake has to be scheduled soon after he brings a plant inside.
“My place is just too dark, and I hate that for obvious reasons,” he said while browsing recently through an Irvine nursery. “I’ve had lots of supposedly healthy [indoor] varieties just fade on me. I’ve pretty much given up on it.”
Think again, said Martin. If the house is extremely dark, she suggests installing a small bank of fluorescent lights discreetly above a bank of plants and flowers, possibly arranged on a floral cart. But if that seems too ambitious (it did to Gallo), Martin offers a list of attractive varieties that can survive under light-stingy conditions.
Among the best are holly ferns, footed ferns, ivy, barbershop plants, rattlesnake plants, dracaena and the ever-popular philodendron. With artificial illumination, you can grow flowering plants such as begonias, dragon flowers, orchids, snow roses, cape primroses, violets, pansies and nasturtiums.
If your home has moderate light, with most windows in an east or west orientation, you probably won’t need to buy a fluorescent tube or two. Instead, arrange plants near windows and be careful about which varieties you select.
Martin has her preferences, including flame violets, fuchsias, orange jasmine, coleus, peacock plants and caladiums. Many of these plants, because of their middling light needs, can actually make your job an easy one.
“Plants grown with half a day of light require a fraction of the effort as far as upkeep,” Martin writes. “When the sun isn’t streaming in, you don’t have to make such frequent visits with the watering can and you don’t have to fertilize as often.”
Still, the luckiest homeowners have south-facing windows, which Martin says allows for many different choices when building a garden. Generous light will help your plants flower, she writes, noting that “if a plant refuses to blossom, chances are good that it is not receiving sufficient light; move it to a south-facing window and it may bud up immediately.”
Some of the most colorful plants for a well-lit home are flowering maple, Brazilian lily, angel’s trumpet, geranium, campanula, Madagascar jasmine, lavender, mandevilla, marmalade plant and Egyptian stars. Fragrant flowers such as heliotrope, gardenia, jasmine and mock orange can also be grown inside.
This was good news to Cila Hauser, who cultivates dozens of roses, irises and other blossoms in the backyard garden of her well-lit Costa Mesa home. She’s never tried to grow varieties indoors but said she would--if they weren’t too hard to care for.
“I never really thought about it before [because] I imagined it would be a big hassle,” she said. “If it was a no-brainer [and] I didn’t have to worry about them dying all the time, I’d do it. It could create a very pretty environment.”
Martin says gardeners do have to monitor their indoor plants closely in a brightly lit house. Flowering types, especially tropical varieties, can get easily scorched from direct sunlight, particularly during the summer. And plants have to be watered more often in such environments.
Beyond this basic advice, Martin recommends regularly pruning dead or dying leaves and branches, watching out for pests (such as whitefly, red spider mites and mealy bugs) and repotting regularly.
Also, don’t let the house get too hot during the day or too dry, especially during winter when the heater is on. During arid periods, cluster plants together to raise their humidity and spray them with water.
“Unlike the plants in your outdoor garden,” Martin says, “your houseplants have to depend on you for everything.”
