Identical Cousins, Part I (Plectranthus verticillatus)

(I don't know about this. Do people still know "The Patty Duke Show?" 'Cause that's where this "identical cousins" thing comes from: stay tuned for Part II, which will probably be posted Saturday.)

This is the plant commonly called Swedish ivy. The botanical name has been P. australis and P. nummularius, and a lot of people still use one or the other of those, but currently, officially, the name is P. verticillatus. It's native to Australia, one of a pretty small number of houseplants¹ which are. (UPDATE: Yeah, um, this might be wrong too. There is no consensus about where this plant is from. The most authoritative-sounding sources say South and/or East Africa, but other sources claim Australia or Southeast Asia.)



Beyond that – well, let's say this was a difficult plant to research. Not only is the botanical name sort of uncertain at the moment, but there seem to be a number of plants with the common name "Swedish ivy," which confuses things. Also, this is sometimes called "creeping Charlie" as well, which makes it one of a gazillion plants going by that name, including the other "identical cousin." Care information is likewise all over the place, with some people saying that it's called Swedish ivy because it can handle cold temperatures and was consequently popular in Sweden, and other people saying not to let it get below 55ºF, which conflict of advice may well be because different people are talking about different species. There are, altogether, maybe ten to fifteen different plants involved in this whole mess. This is why common names drive me insane, and why I stick to the scientific names as much as I can (in case you'd ever wondered).²

So I'm going to just skip over all that and talk about what my own plant, and the identical ones at work, seem to like, and if somebody has a problem with that then we can just take this outside and settle this like childish men.

Ahem.

Care information: this is an easy plant to keep alive, but it's a pain to keep it looking nice. Light is the main difficulty I have with mine (or the ones at work, for that matter): too little, and the stems get weak and elongated, but too much, and the leaves bleach out. They do self-branch, a bit, though if you want a presentable, bushy plant, you have to pinch back the tips occasionally. They also seem to be pretty heavy feeders, but that's sort of to be expected for a plant that grows as fast as it does.



None of these are enormous problems, and there are a number of good points, too: overwatering and underwatering are taken in stride (though watering when the soil is about halfway dry, or a little drier, seems to be about ideal), it isn't particularly prone to pests, and humidity and temperature seem to be non-issues as far as I've seen. Plus it propagates easier than almost anything – root it in soil, root it in water, root it in dirty socks (haven't tried it, but I bet you $5 it would work: just, you know, keep the socks damp but not soaked, and send me a picture). This is useful in a few ways: one, you can always give away cuttings if somebody asks, secure in the knowledge that you can easily get more where that came from, and two, if you get tired of a particular plant that isn't looking great, starting it over takes about three minutes and a glass of water. You can also fill in empty spots in a plant pretty easily, just by taking a cutting, making a hole in the soil, and sticking the cutting in the hole: this won't work out every time, but it will work often enough.

If you're adding cuttings to an existing pot, you shouldn't have any worries about the soil. If you're trying to start a new plant entirely, in most cases you still won't have to be concerned about soil, but make sure it's not something that's going to be really heavy and wet, because too much water will cause the cuttings to fail.

Plectranthus verticillatus seems to be one of the old standard plants, though it's not often sold in stores: it's one of those like Tradescantia zebrina (wandering Jew) that gets passed around from person to person and generation to generation without ever really seeing retail.³ We sell it at work, and it's not a big mover, though hanging baskets do well if they're full. Unfortunately, the hanging baskets I started in the early fall have gotten way too much light, and are kind of a sickly yellowish color. I'm hoping that if I move them to a darker spot, the leaves will green up, but even if the old leaves don't get darker, the new growth should be normal. It'll fix itself one way or the other.

There's also a variegated version, which looks almost exactly the same:



For reasons which aren't entirely clear to me, my variegated plants have not done nearly as well as I was expecting. I think a lot of my problem is just that I didn't plant a lot of cuttings together in the first place, so they don't look as full, but I've also had a lot of cuttings (30-40%?) fail at once when the weather turned colder here, because the soil was suddenly staying soaked for long periods.⁴ It's not such that I can't take more cuttings and go on with my life, but I'm not entirely sure that I want to: they revert to all-green pretty readily anyway, and I already have plenty of green Swedish ivy.

This is, in any case, a really excellent beginners' plant: it's not difficult to keep alive, and it grows gratifyingly quickly when it's happy. I find it difficult to get excited about, but it's hard to find fault with it, either.

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Photo credits: me.

¹ Among the others: Schefflera actinophylla and S. arboricola, and Araucaria bidwillii (monkey-puzzle tree Bunya pine, or bunya-bunya tree). It's not a long list, though.
² Best example of this I can think of, which I either used at Pick a Plant or else really, really meant to use there: if I say "zebra plant" to you, you probably have a more or less immediate picture in your head of which species you expect me to be talking about. The trouble is, you have no way to know whether the zebra plant I'm talking about is the succulent Haworthia attenuata, the yellow-flowering Aphelandra squarrosa, the foliage plant Calathea zebrina (and to make that more ridiculous, the photo for C. zebrina at this site is a picture of Calathea ornata instead. Also, there is apparently a second Calathea, C. bella, called "zebra plant," so even if you get the genus right, we might still be talking about different species), the outdoor plant Sanchezia nobilis glaucophylla, or the bromeliad Aechmea chantinii. Even if you have a hard time with the scientific names, you should be able to see from this example why they're necessary.
³ Though I'm told that Tradescantia zebrina actually sells really well here in the spring, so maybe I'm going to find out that it's a hot retail item after all, in a few months.
⁴ A little baffling, actually, since the temperature and amount of light and so forth didn't really change that much: the plants just stopped taking up water one day, is what it looks like.