Striking Sansevierias

This Japanese website has some photos of Sansevieria plants with particularly good design qualities. Unfortunately, I was not able to translate it but you can look at the photos, which are labeled with the botanical names. Most of the photos I find on the web are of plants in grower pots with little aesthetic quality. These are exceptional.

Sansevierias are excellent indoor plants. It’s unfortunate that so few of them are available at retail. Unfortunately there’s very little creative merchandising of indoor plants in the U.S. By the way, think about the marketing appeal of naming a plant Snake Plant or Mother-in-law’s Tongue.

I find Sansevieras readily adaptable to sub-irrigation using either a soil mix (Supersoil) or expanded clay pebbles (hydroculture).

Read more about Sansevieria from the archives.

When All Else Fails

When all else fails...try this.

Vines or Pebbles Ground Cover

When using arcane poke and pour top watering (drench and drain) it is necessary to have access to the soil surface to test moisture. With soil or expanded clay pebble (hydroculture) measured sub-irrigation you can decorate the soil surface to suit your fancy. There’s no need for finger poking.

You can view many samples of soil surface decoration here in this Flickr photo set. Note that you can enlarge the photos. Click on “All Sizes” on the menu at the top.

Ficus pumila (Creeping Fig) is a very good groundcover for use under tabletop Ficus benjamina (Weeping Fig) and Schefflera arboricola (Dwarf Hawaiian Schefflera) trees. The juvenile form has small leaves that are in scale with the tabletop trees and has the same cultural requirements. The mature leaves are much larger but you needn't worry about that with tabletop indoor plants.

Recently I have found a good selection of polished stone pebbles at IKEA and Wal-Mart. They’re packaged in small bags of various colors and stone sizes for about 70 cents a bag.

Soil surface decoration definitely adds a low cost finishing touch to high quality indoor plants. It's a small amount of added work and well worth doing.

Cookie Container Propagator

Click to enlarge. Two recycled cookie containers make a perfect propagator for these Ficus pumila (Creeping Fig) cuttings. They come with snap-on covers. I cut out the center of the cover with a box cutter, following the outer raised edge. The outer snap-on rings then provide more of a bearing surface when the two containers are joined as a top and bottom as you see in the photo.

I use a mixture of Supersoil and perlite as a propagating medium with supplementary light supplied by a compact fluorescent lamp.

Big Meanie Wal-Mart in the News Again

I recently bought a couple of yards of Pellon Thermolam Plus ($2.97/yard) for sub-irrigation wicking at Wal-Mart. This 100% polyester washable fleece is clearly the best fabric I’ve used for this purpose.

It’s great! It wicks well. is super-tough and is easy to clean with a little bleach solution. Use it instead of more expensive capillary matting. It’s a lot easier to find a fabric store than a horticultural supply house. I've been calling it AquaPad.

The cloth, of course, is supplied in bolts. Someone has to cut it. After waiting my turn, I got into conversation with the woman who was cutting the cloth. I said to her, you mean Wal-Mart hasn’t found a way to automate this department. She agreed that it was a tedious job. There were several people in line and some Wal-Mart bashing ensued.

Someone must have been listening. Big meanie Wal-Mart is now in the news again. They’re planning to close the fabric department in new and remodeled stores. This has created an uproar in many parts of the country.

For example, “Readers set a record for The Baxter Bulletin Online Poll with the number of votes on the latest question and the widest margin of any poll since it started.” Read more…

I'll bet there were some fabric store owners cheering this news.

Aerogarden on Amazon "Best of 2006" List

The Aerogarden made Amazon's 2006 List of Most Wished for Products. Note that it ranks just after an Apple iPod.

Aeroponics From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aeroponics is a hydroponic technique involving the use of sprayers, nebulizers, foggers, or other devices to create a fine mist of solution to deliver nutrients to plant roots. Read more...

Here are over 100 photos of the Aerogarden on Flickr.com. I haven't tested one but these photos are quite convincing that it really does work.

It's great to see a product using modern technology be successful in the indoor plant market. It helps to prove that techniques like hydroculture and soil subirrigation coupled with adequate artificial light are effective ways to grow and maintain plants inside buildings.

When is American horticultural academia going to wake up and participate in the digital age? Clay pots, drain holes and saucers are such a dumb idea for indoor plants. They belong outdoors not inside our homes or offices.