Hooker With a Heart of Gold (Anthurium andraeanum)

I am not the world's best salesman. I don't fake enthusiasm easily,¹ I lie pretty well but only if I have time to think about it first, I am naturally suspicious of anybody I don't know, and really suspicious of people I don't know who want me to give them money². And, more to the point, I expect that everybody else feels the same way. So I will knock myself out to try to find a plant that matches your conditions, but I'm going to have a hard time recommending something for you if you're asking for the impossible, even if doing so would make a sale, and I will throw myself bodily between you and the Cyclamen table if you tell me you're new to plants and you're looking for a long-term low-light bloomer for your hot, dry bedroom.


For obvious reasons, I haven't discussed this tendency with my employer, though I doubt it would matter that much, since they have made a point of telling me not to bullshit the customers when I don't know stuff about plants, even to make a sale. It's not a huge step to trying to block sales that will end badly, since I can usually suggest alternatives, or at least explain why something would be a bad idea and what the customer would have to do to make it not such a bad idea.

This is all a roundabout way of explaining why I like Anthurium andraeanum hybrids so much. They, for the most part, sell themselves – the foliage is shiny and pretty, there are flowers, the flowers are long lived and brightly colored, and unlike everything else in the greenhouse I can recommend them to most people with a clean conscience. (And, if people are going to insist on flowers, well, what am I supposed to suggest instead? A peace lily?) There was one day when every customer I talked to left with an Anthurium, or just about (I think the actual count was like five out of six or five out of seven). It was crazy.


There are a few people who don't like the flowers. Sometimes, especially with pink and red flowers, the spadix winds up looking a little . . . let's say pornographic. I'm not sure how to feel about this: on the one hand, the resemblance isn't even very good, so it's kind of a silly reason to reject an otherwise fine plant . But then, you don't necessarily get to choose what kinds of shapes and colors squick you out,³ and I myself have declined to purchase perfectly nice plants because I didn't like some random minor feature or another⁴, so who am I to judge.

I wound up with my two (which were tagged as Anthurium x 'Cotton Candy') in January, because I had been working in a small natural foods store that was trying to get going. It started in April 2006 and was out of business by January 2007, but it sparked my interest in houseplants (which had been sort of dormant until I started, in August), because they included some houseplants in the floral department.⁵ The owner's wife was the one who did the plant ordering, and she had a weakness for, among other things, Anthuriums, mostly big cultivars like 'Lady Jane.' When I started working there, I took note of the ones that were there, thinking, oh, too bad those are never going to survive in here, but then they did. They didn't thrive, but they lived, and seemed to be just fine.

This made me reconsider the genus. So in January, just a few days before the announcement that the store had officially gone under and it was all over but the going out of business sale, I went and got a couple of my own.


I figured the foliage would be nice, even if it never flowered. And it was nice, for quite a while, and then in late June, there was a flower. There's been at least one flower (between the two plants) at any given time since then; that first one lasted for two months. I still like the foliage, of course, but it's nice for once to have been seduced by a plant that meant a little bit of the sweet talk.

The difficulty rating is mostly for four things: 1) don't underwater. It's not hugely touchy about this, but you do need to pay attention if you want it to do well. 2) It needs bright light. Filtered sun is preferable; I have mine very close to some fluorescent shop lights in a room that also gets some afternoon sun, and that combination seems to be acceptable. 3) Don't get it too cold, or too hot. Short temperature fluctuations probably won't kill the plant, but it won't do it any favors either. Long temperature fluctuations, in either direction, might in fact kill the plants. 4) It's not easily propagated. Plants will offset over time, and the resulting clump can be divided, but offsetting doesn't seem to be a fast process. Seeds aren't easy to come by, and aren't viable for very long when you can find them. Cuttings can be taken and rooted, but it's a slow process, and it takes a long time to get back to a presentable-looking plant again. Most commercial production is from tissue culture.

When I said, earlier, that I can recommend them to most people with a clean conscience -- I wouldn't say it should be your very first houseplant, if you're just getting started. But the instincts of a lot of new houseplant growers are to overdo everything (full sun, really wet, maybe the occasional misting, frequent feeding), and these are conditions that an Anthurium could roll with. Or at least an andraeanum: some of the other Anthurium species are less flexible.

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Photo credits: all me.

¹ My teachers in high school were occasionally moved to comment on my lack of school spirit: I never saw the point at the time and, frankly, still don't understand why, of all the things we could be teaching high school students, blind allegiance to institutions is a priority.
² I would think this might be genetic, except for the fact that my parents and grandparents make huuuuuuuge exceptions for anything religious. I mean, nobody in the family was ever living off cat food so they could send all their money to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, but I've seen, and been the indirect victim of, a certain number of religious con men in my time, and that's even before you get into the crap I've caught over being gay.
³ I have had people give similar reasons for not liking other plants: one woman declined a rabbit's-foot fern, Davallia spp., because the rhizomes crawling across the soil surface looked too much like snakes for her.
⁴ I'm not grossed out by them, but old-man cactus, Cephalocereus whatever, and other "long-haired" plants, just don't appeal to me at all. I couldn't tell you why; I've never had any traumatic childhood experiences with them or anything. I just think they're kind of unpleasant to look at.
⁵ (Even still, 36 of my plants trace back to this store, including some of my favorites. Of course, some of the reason that they're my favorites is because they've survived, so they may or may not have had an especially good selection.)