PATSP Top Ten Houseplants

A few days ago, Elizabeth Licata at Garden Rant posted a list of her top ten houseplants, rating them by "killability," "beauty," and "maintenance." I think killability and maintenance should really be the same thing: a properly-maintained plant, regardless of its requirements, ought to be pretty hard to kill. (It's just that some plants have completely unreasonable ideas about what "properly maintained" should involve.) But whatever. I went ahead and used that anyway, though I've renamed maintenance as "anxiety," since Licata used how much anxiety the plant causes as her test of what maintenance rating to give.

But whatever. Anyway. So here are my choices for top ten houseplants, using the same criteria she did, on 0-10 scales.¹ The numbers for beauty and anxiety were quick and dirty subjective values, and would not necessarily come out the same were I do do this again, but if I did it again, you'd probably see the same twenty plants showing up repeatedly, in varying combinations. I've included the ten runners-up at the end of the list, as honorable mentions.

10. Aglaonema cvv. (Chinese evergreen).
Difficulty: 8.4
Beauty: 7.5
Anxiety: 7.0

Aglaonema 'Diamond Bay.'
I'm not surprised Aglaonema made it on the top ten, but I would have expected them to place a little higher, since I consider them pretty much the perfect houseplant.

9. Schlumbergera truncata cvv. (Christmas cactus, Thanksgiving cactus)
Difficulty: 7.6
Beauty: 6.5
Anxiety: 9.0

NOID Schlumbergera, or whatever (see footnote 5). Photo is by gailf548, from Flickr.com.
This was the first surprise to show up on the list: I have one, but it's tiny and asymmetrical and kind of goofy-looking, and not a plant I think about very much. I don't disagree with my numbers, though, so I guess it deserves to be here.

8. Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant, airplane plant, mala madre).
Difficulty: 9.9
Beauty: 6.0
Anxiety: 8.0

Chlorophytum comosum.
I know there are people who have trouble with these, but . . . well . . . but they shouldn't. They're really not that complicated.

7. Saxifraga stolonifera (strawberry begonia)
Difficulty: 8.4
Beauty: 7.0
Anxiety: 8.0

Saxifraga stolonifera.
Not something I would have thought to put on the list if I were coming up with it off the top of my head, and in fact not something I even particularly cared for before starting the present job, but they've grown on me. They've also grown on everything else.

6. Chlorophytum x 'Fire Flash' (Fire Flash, Green Orange, Mandarin plant)
Difficulty: 9.9
Beauty: 6.0
Anxiety: 8.0

Chlorophytum x 'Fire Flash.'
These are a little messy sometimes (if only the leaves didn't go so dramatically black when they die!), but I've never met a plant that was so indifferent to care, pests, etc. And although I kind of take it for granted now, that's a really pretty orange.

5. Aloe aristata hybrid (no common name as far as I know)
Difficulty: 8.2
Beauty: 7.0
Anxiety: 9.0

Possibly Aloe aristata x Gasteria batesiana. It's gotten much bigger since this picture was taken.
Another surprise. Not that I don't love mine, not that it hasn't been, like, the easiest plant ever, but I would never have thought of it for a top ten list, and it's weird that it showed up here.

4. Sansevieria trifasciata cvv. (snake plant, mother-in-law's tongue)
Difficulty: 8.5-7.6, depending on cultivar
Beauty: 5.5-7.0, depending on cultivar
Anxiety: 9.0

Sansevieria trifasciata 'Laurentii.'
A surprising number of customers don't like these; people seem to either love them or hate them. A big, full 'Laurentii' is a gorgeous plant, though. And 'Black Gold' kicks ass all over the place.

3. Haworthia attenuata (or possibly H. fasciata: see comments) (zebra plant)
Difficulty: 8.8
Beauty: 6.0
Anxiety: 10.0

Haworthia attenuata. Unless it's H. fasciata.

It's true that I've never had any trouble with these, and when they're happy, they do look very good. But #3, Mr. S? Seriously?

I have no explanation.

2. Philodendron hederaceum cvv. (heart-leaf philodendron)
Difficulty: 8.8-9.7, depending on cultivar
Beauty: 7.0-8.0, depending on cultivar
Anxiety: 8.0

Philodendron hederaceum micans.
Okay, now this is more like it. I'm always surprised when I see a list of easy-care houseplants that includes pothos (Epipremnum aureum) and not Philodendron hederaceum, because pothos gives me considerably more difficulty.

A lot of people can't tell the two apart, either, which makes me think that the omission of Philodendron might be because people think they've included it already. It's the much better plant, in any case, and the all-yellow version ('Aureum,' or 'Lemon-Lime') is really very attractive, with reddish new growth, bright yellow mid-aged growth, and green older leaves. I also like 'Brasil,' which is both green and yellow, and micans, which is reddish, with a velvety appearance.

Even my mother can grow Philodendron hederaceum.² So you really couldn't ask for a more tolerant plant.

1. Dracaena deremensis group ('Warneckei,' 'Limelight,'³ 'Lemon-Lime,' 'Goldstar,' 'Art,' 'Janet Craig,' 'Riki,'⁴ 'Janet Craig Compacta,' etc.)
Difficulty: 7.9-9.0, depending on cultivar
Beauty: 7.0-8.0, depending on cultivar
Anxiety: 9.0-10.0, depending on cultivar

Dracaena deremensis 'Lemon-Lime,' or possibly 'Goldstar.' The two look pretty much identical.
Dracaena deremensis 'Art.'
God help you if you don't like strappy-leaved plants, but if you do, there's something somewhere in the deremensis species for you. They're robust, undemanding, come in a variety of colors, patterns, and sizes, and are just all-around solid members of the houseplant community.

Amazingly, Licata and I overlap on only two and a half plants: Schlumbergera (though she calls it something else⁵) and Sansevieria are the full overlaps, and Dracaena is the partial one (she mentions every kind of Dracaena except the deremensis group, but they're probably close enough to count). I think a lot of this is because she's biased toward flowering plants more than I am. I evaluated flowering plants too, and I did give them points for beauty -- you'll notice that the plants in this list don't actually have particularly high beauty scores -- but none of them are conspicuously easy, for all the drama of the flowers. The three highest-rating plants primarily grown for their flowers were Schlumbergera, which did just barely sneak into a spot on the list, Anthurium andraeanum, and Vriesea splendens.

Honorable mentions:
11. Yucca guatemalensis (7.5)
12. Zamioculcas zamiifolia (7.5)
13. Ardisia elliptica (7.4)
14. Alworthia 'Black Gem' (7.4)
15. Strelitzia nicolai (7.4)
16. Anthurium andraeanum (7.4)
17. Echinocactus grusonii (7.4)
18. Ficus microcarpa (7.3)
19. Ficus maclellandii (7.3)
20. Synadenium grantii (7.3)

So . . . what's your top ten list look like?

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Photo credits: All mine, except the Schlumbergera picture.

¹ In order to make the average work out properly, and make higher-ranking plants get higher numbers, I had to flip the PATSP difficulty rating around. So the number for "difficulty" here is just ten minus the PATSP number.
² The plant thing skipped a generation. Grandma always had lots, though mostly her stuff was outdoors. Mom has frequently tried, but she's not consistent enough with tropicals and just flat-out doesn't like succulents (Mother! You're embarrassing me in front of the other garden bloggers!), so there are usually only a few at any given moment, and none of the few are usually doing all that well. But: I've given her a Philodendron hederaceum and a Saxifraga stolonifera, and she reports that both of them are currently doing okay.
³ There is the possibility that 'Limelight' is actually a sport of Dracaena fragrans, not D. deremensis. I've had a tough time locating any information about where 'Limelight' originated. Never mind. It's D. deremensis. It was a mutation of 'Warneckei,' apparently.
⁴ There is the possibility that 'Riki' is actually a sport of Dracaena reflexa, not D. deremensis. I've had a tough time locating any information about where 'Riki' originated. UPDATE: 'Riki' is in fact a sport of Dracaena reflexa. See 'Riki' profile for details.
⁵ "Schlumbergia." It's actually Schlumbergera. I am still looking for definitive answers about the Schlum/Zygo distinction (whether there is one, what the difference between the two if they're different). All the people who are positive they know seem to be split about fifty-fifty. These are, of course, pretty small nits to pick. Have decided as of 26 October 2009 to just call them all Schlumbergera.

Random plant event: fern gametophytes, or, How to Make Your Own Ferns at Home

I was curious about how difficult it really was to grow ferns indoors from spores, so I took either a frond or a part of a frond from a holly fern (Cyrtomium falcatum) at work and brought it home. I also took some damp toilet paper at work and wiped it on a Asplenium nidus that had formed spores, to collect those (I didn't want to cut off the frond).

When I got these home, I took a smallish (about 6 inches / 15 cm square) clear plastic container, washed it, filled it with vermiculite, and then added water to the vermiculite.

I let the vermiculite and water sit for a minute, and then dumped out the excess water (holding the vermiculite back with my hand).

Then I held the frond above the wet vermiculite and brushed the spores off onto it with my fingers.

I unfolded the toilet paper with the Asplenium spores, and peeled it down to a single layer of paper, and set that down on top of the vermiculite too.

Then I replaced the top back on the tray, stuck it in an out-of-the-way spot where it would be protected from temperature fluctuations and get lots of light (artificial, in this case), and waited.

And now I have this:

Click the picture to enlarge.
It's not, I know, the most exciting image ever. But those little green spots? Those are spores that have become gametophytes. This is encouraging.

Ferns have a very roundabout life cycle, where the spores hit the ground and, under the right conditions, develop into small "gametophytes," which are photosynthetic and exist only to form eggs and sperm (yes, each gametophyte produces both, though usually at different times, so as to avoid self-fertilization). The eggs stay put, but the sperm travels across the moist ground looking for an egg to fertilize. If it finds one, then the two combine to form a new sporophyte, which is the ferny-looking thing that most of us know as a fern. (Though the gametophytes are just as much ferns as the sporophytes, of course.)

We still have a ways to go before I have a bunch of little ferns sporophytes: first the sperm cells have to find some eggs, and then they have to photosynthesize enough to build some fronds before I'll see that anything is different. But still. It's not difficult to do so far, at least. I'll update when something new happens.

Music video: Sam Phillips "I Need Love"

Sam Phillips used to perform under the name Leslie Phillips, and was a not-terribly-prominent Christian musician there for a while in the mid-1980s. Wikiposedly, at least one factor in her leaving the Christian label Myrrh and striking out on her own was Myrrh's stubborn insistence on promoting her as "the Christian Cyndi Lauper," despite the fact that Phillips, you know, didn't think she was the Christian Cyndi Lauper, or any other kind of Cyndi Lauper for that matter. Which tells you everything you need to know about the situation right there, and also tells you quite a bit about Myrrh as a company and the Christian music industry in the mid- and late 1980s.

Although I listened exclusively to Christian rock music, by parental edict, until late in high school (and was in fact traumatized by Toni Basil's "Mickey" when I was in third grade -- which is both funny and not), and sort of knew of Leslie Phillips, I never cared about her music one way or the other. At some point in what would have had to have been my junior year of college, I saw this video, one time, liked it, remembered it, and sought out the CD. Only some time later did I find out that Sam Phillips and Leslie Phillips were the same person.

This is actually not the best song on the album Martinis and Bikinis, but the video for "Baby I Can't Please You" (a song about her relationship with Myrrh and the Christian music industry in general, oh-so-cleverly disguised as a breakup song) isn't embeddable. If you liked this, check that one out too.

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It looks like the music video thing, however irrelevant to houseplants, is going to be a recurring feature. It'll always be extra, though, never instead of plant content, so those of you who are here for the plants can skip on past them. The videos may not be terribly frequent, anyway, as most of the videos I want to post turn out not to be embeddable.

Pretty pictures: assorted Dendrobium NOIDs

We got a new shipment of plants in at the beginning of November, and among them were six new Dendrobiums. One was the "Humphrey Bogart" variety that I mentioned in a previous post, and one was, if not 'Hollywood,' then at least something very close to it in color. These are the other four. None of them had ID tags.


I don't know that it's a huge deal not to know what the variety name is on these -- it's not going to make much of a difference in how they're cared for or what they're going to do -- but it bugs me not to be told anyway. If nothing else, having the names handy means that I can ask for the same plants again, if they turn out to be exceptionally cool, popular, interesting, or whatever.


I now have two Dendrobiums, by the way, both keikis, and I picked up my first non-Dendrobium about a month ago (Brassiolaeliocattleya Helene Brown), which was also a tiny plant and relatively cheap. Last Saturday, I went out with the husband for a little while and was brutally attacked by a vicious Paphiopedilum (Paph. Supersuk 'Eureka' x Paph. Raisin Pie 'Hsinying' x Sib, whatever all that means) that would not leave me alone until I purchased it.

Love this one, by the way. This one and the next one both, really.
Add these to the Ludisia discolor I already owned, and we've gone from one orchid to five orchids in a matter of two months. I sense a slippery slope around here somewhere.


Also, I have to say, I would really like to know how an orchid gets the name "Supersuk." It seems like it would have to be an interesting story.

There will probably be a post about the Paphiopedilum in the very near future.

Random plant event: Pilea cadierei flower

This is actually a kind of old picture; the Pilea cadiereis started to flower about a month ago. They're not much to look at, but I can just about guarantee that this is the biggest close-up picture of Pilea cadierei flowers you'll see all day. And if it's not big enough for you, open it in its own window. It gets bigger.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Sogo Rose

I'm not the biggest Phalaenopsis fan, though it's not because they're bad plants. I just get tired of seeing the same ones over and over. We have a lot of white ones at the moment (long story¹), and while there's nothing objectionable about white, it's a little boring.

We got this one when it was in bud but not in bloom yet, so I've been keeping an eye on it, and I have to say, I like this better than most. I didn't expect this color from a Phal (the photo doesn't do it justice, actually: it's very close to, but not quite, red), and I'm even more pleased about the petal shape. The odd little points on the petals make it work for me. So this one's okay.

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¹ A customer wanted to get some for a mid-September wedding, so I ordered some from Florida when I did the rest of our tropical order, in mid-August. Upon arrival, they all went kerflooey: buds dropped, the few flowers that were open already developed unpleasant black spots (about which I posted previously), and we wound up having to order more. The replacements were smaller, and better, but for some reason we only received three (the customer had originally asked for six, and failing that "at least four"). Those ones did fine, but the customers apparently wound up changing their minds anyway (I suspect they were encouraged to do so by the flower shop, who knew we didn't have as many as they wanted, though this is not what the flower shop says), leaving us stuck with nine white Phalaenopsis, six of which have dropped most (but not all) of their flowers and aren't particularly sellable until and unless they decide to bloom again.
Hence, sick of white Phalaenopsis.

Sod tips

Another one from NotAlwaysRight.com:

TREE NURSERY | NEW YORK, NY, USA

Manager: “When laying down the sod, make sure the green side goes up.”

Customer: “Are you serious? You have to tell me that the green side of the grass goes side up?”

Manager: “I wouldn’t have to say it if someone didn’t make the mistake.”

Fictional botany: Miscanthus decafasciatus

Mathly whipgrass (Miscanthus decafasciatus) is a tall (to 7 feet / 2.1 m) spreading (to 5 feet / 1.5 m across) perennial grass native to the Middle East and Northeast Africa. It is sometimes grown as a showy ornamental, though it is less commonly grown than zebra grass (M. sinensis), to which it is related. The leaves are very narrow (0.25 in / 0.6 cm), stiffly upright, and bright green, drying to yellow in the winter. The flowers are white, and maintain their appearance very well when dried: for this reason, they are often used in arrangements.

The common name derives from the narrow transverse black bands on the leaf blades: the topmost bands on a leaf are arranged closely together, and become further apart as the leaf grows, until the tenth such band is reached, at which point the pattern repeats, forming a logarithmic scale. Ancient nerds used the leaves to form primitive slide rules, which can be surprisingly accurate (to within about five percent) if correctly constructed. Despite the common name, this is not related to the plant called whipgrass (Hemarthria compressa).

Mathly whipgrass is hardy to zone 5b and does not seem to be invasive. For best presentation, bunches should be divided every three to four years or they will flop over.

There are two subspecies:

M. decafasciatus octofasciatus (eight-banded whipgrass), which has the same general pattern but the bands repeat in groups of eight instead of ten, found in northern Iraq and northeastern Syria, and
M. decafasciatus africanus (dwarf mathly whipgrass), a shorter variety not exceeding four feet (m) in height, but with the same ten-band pattern. Africanus, despite the name, is native to Turkey.

-from A Field Guide to Imaginary Plants (Mr. Subjunctive, ed.)

So close, yet so far away. . . .

From Not Always Right, a website I recently discovered. I've been reading through the archives (avidly!) and found this gem:

GARDEN CENTER | TORONTO, ON CANADA

(I overheard a coworker trying to help someone choose a plant.)

Coworker: “Hi, how can I help you today?”

Customer: “I’m looking for a nice plant for the front of my house.”

Coworker: “Alright, we have a number of excellent options to choose from. What kind of sun exposure does the spot get?”

Customer: “Well… it’s light all day, then dark at night.”

Me: *losing hope*

If I'd known about this site sooner, I could have submitted a lot of very similar conversations. You would be astounded. (No, seriously. It's actually kind of depressing sometimes.) My favorite, though, is still the conversation I saw in a Garden Web thread, where "tasdevil" (also from Ontario, so possibly the same person, or the same garden center, at least) related this one:

Me: What direction does your window face?
Customer: To the left.

Unrelated picture of Gaillardia aristata 'Arizona Sun,' for decorative purposes.

Tin Woodsman (Pachypodium geayi and P. lamerei)

(This is part 4 of the Wizard of Oz series of plant profiles.)

I really like Pachypodiums. I like the look of them; I like that they're not unreasonably difficult to care for; I like that I got mine outrageously cheap.¹ I even like the thorns -- kinda. They certainly make it look more intense and dangerous, and along with the silvery gray (dare I say tin?) color of the trunk, they give it a sort of industrial / Alien / sculptural look. I mean, if you had never seen one before, you could maybe believe it as some kind of plant from the future, some kind of machine-plant combination made from nanobots! by space aliens! or whatever.


However. I spend a lot of my time at work moving plants from one place to another. I try not to move the Pachypodiums so much, but I still have to move things that are near them, and, well, there is only one plant that's resulted in more lost time with the tweezers, trying to pull thorns/spines out of my body.² The Pachypodiums also like to team up with the Agaves so that one lightly pokes me from one side, causing my hand to jerk away from it involuntarily into the other plant: whether I jerk into the Pachypodium or into the Agave, I wind up getting stabbed deeply, and the Pachypodium spines like to break off in my skin, so then I have to take my hand apart to remove the broken-off piece.

If they only had a heart. Or hearts, plural, I guess. You know?

But even so. In the course of poking around the web looking for interesting stuff about the plant, I found a lot of people saying things like, "This is my favorite plant." Which is pretty high praise. I wouldn't go that far, personally, but it's been kind of delightfully unproblematic, and as we know from some of the other profiles, it's not like I necessarily object to being surrounded by plants with thorns, spines, sharp edges, potentially deadly poisons, or whatever. If that's the most dangerous kind of thrill-seeking I do, I should be able to live a long and healthy life anyway.


The common name for these, "Madagascar palm," is half correct. They are from Madagascar. Pachypodiums are not palms, however, even though they look a little (a very little, in my opinion) like one. Besides the 25ish³ described Pachypodium species, the family Apocynaceae includes several other ornamentals like Nerium oleander (oleander), Adenium obesum (desert rose), which I'll be profiling shortly, Mandevilla/Dipladenia,⁴ Vinca, Catharanthus (also - incorrectly - called Vinca), and Plumeria (frangipani). Of these, few are grown indoors, though I've heard of Adenium, Nerium, and Plumeria being used as houseplants to some degree or another.⁵ (Of course, with Plumeria, pretty much the only person I know to attempt it indoors is WCW, who is always pushing the envelope on what range of species might be called "houseplants.")

Pachypodium's closest relatives would be Mandevilla, Adenium, and Nerium, which are all not only in the same family but are also in the same subfamily. The family resemblance is not particularly obvious from the various growth habits: it's not a vine like Mandevilla or a dense shrub like Nerium, and although young plants resemble a spiny Adenium, the similarities fade with age as the plant's trunk elongates. The stems of Mandevilla, Adenium and Plumeria do all, at some point in the plant's life, have the same gray-metallic sheen to them. Also the flowers are fairly similar in all the cultivated plants: five-petaled, usually red, pink, or white with a yellow center, and often though not always trumpet-shaped. So the family resemblance is there; you just have to look for it a little.

Pachypodiums flower too, but it's uncommon, and plants have to be fairly large, apparently, before it happens. It's not likely to happen indoors. I'm told the flowers are white, trumpet-shaped, and fragrant. There are pictures of varying quality at these four sites: (1) (2) (3) (4). I especially recommend #4.


Another common feature of the Apocynaceae is poison.⁶ All parts of Pachypodiums are poisonous, though I've never had any reactions as extreme as the one described here, which describes pain, numbness and swelling as the result of being stabbed by a thorn. I've heard rumors that the entire plant may not be poisonous: plantzafrica.com claims that the pith at the center of P. geayi can be strained through a cloth to yield a really unpleasant-sounding but technically edible sap. (Don't try this yourself, obviously.) I didn't see this confirmed anywhere else, though, so I'm kind of still skeptical about it being true.

Also unconfirmed: Plantzafrica.com also claims that certain rural African peoples use P. geayi as a makeshift beehive, after hollowing it out, though there are no details about how this is done or why it would be necessary. Nice bit of coincidence: in the movie, the Wicked Witch of the West threatens to turn the Tin Woodsman into a beehive.

But I'm digressing.

P. geayi and P. lamerei are, as best as I can tell, the two most commonly grown indoor species, and not particularly easy to tell apart because there aren't a lot of pictures of the two side-by-side around to compare to. Most Pachypodiums in the retail horticulture world are P. lamerei: the main way to tell it apart from P. geayi is that geayi has small hairs on the leaves, particularly on the underside, and the leaves tend to be longer, darker, and bluer in color than on lamerei. The absence of hairs doesn't necessarily mean you have lamerei (sometimes geayi doesn't have the hairs, especially on young plants), but if hairs are present, then it probably is geayi. I thought for a very long time that my plant was probably geayi, then was informed by a PATSP reader that no, I probably had lamerei like everybody else.

Those websites expressing an opinion said that lamerei is the easier of the two to grow.


These can do very well indoors, though like a lot of plants, they do benefit from time outdoors if you can swing it for them.^{7, 8}

LIGHT: The more, the better, within reason. These are best in a bright, large, unobstructed south window. They might get by in an east or west, but I make no promises. Haven't tried it, don't intend to. My own plant is in a south window but has to compete with a lot of other plants, and gets moved around a lot, so its situation is probably best described as partly-filtered sun, and this is apparently acceptable.

WATERING: This is a little bit tricky. During the winter, they go semi-dormant and need very little. During the summer, they need to be watered much more often. How much is "very little?" How frequently is "much more often?" Well. During the summer, the plant is relatively flexible, and it's not a big deal to water when the soil is dry to about half the depth of the pot. During the winter, aim for watering a couple days after the soil gets completely dry. (The thick trunk stores water. It'll be okay.) During the spring and fall, letting it go almost but not completely dry is good. Watering too much will result in leaves yellowing and dropping. Watering way too much will result in rot. The best defense against overwatering, if you're worried that you just won't be able to help yourself, is to use a clay pot and soil with really excellent drainage. Underwatering is really hard to do, but leaves will turn crispy and drop, and I'm guessing the trunk will also shrivel as the plant uses up the water it's stored. The shriveling may or may not actually be noticeable.

HUMIDITY: They don't care.


TEMPERATURE: Information about this on-line varies, and I don't have any personal experience with trying to see how cold they'll let me get. The most conservative range, from what I see, is 50-100ºF (10-37ºC); a few sites say you might be able to go down to just above freezing, but I wouldn't try it. Our plants at work have, until recently, been along a wall in the greenhouse, where they get hot, dry air blown directly at them from underneath whenever the heater comes on. This has been a problem only insofar as the heat dries out the soil faster, and leaves me confused as to when I should water, which I have a tendency to overdo with the succulents anyway. But the heat itself is not the problem.

PESTS: I've never had a problem with pests on mine, or the ones at work. Rot can be a big problem, even on well-established plants, particularly if the plant has been injured. Mealybugs are not unheard of, and spider mites are a problem for everything else in the Apocynaceae, so I wouldn't be surprised by spider mites. None of these are particularly likely, persistent, or damaging, but they are contagious, so it's good to keep an eye out anyway.

PROPAGATION: Usually, Pachypodium are grown from seed, and different websites report different degrees of success getting the seeds to sprout. The seeds don't store well, and are best used as soon as possible. They are also somewhat slow to germinate (about a month?) and not necessarily all that easy to find in the first place. As plants will occasionally branch on their own, sometimes from the base, people do occasionally take cuttings, for which the procedure is more or less the same as for cacti or Euphorbias: cut off a piece (mind the sap! And the thorns!), let it callous and dry in a bright but sunless spot for a week or two, then plant it upright in soil with unbelievably good drainage and water very conservatively until there are signs of rooting. If your plant begins to rot, taking a cutting of a healthy part of the stem, if one exists, is your best bet at salvaging something.


GROOMING: Plants will usually shed leaves in the fall or winter, as they go dormant, though if you slow down watering properly, this is less likely: they don't have to drop leaves, necessarily. There shouldn't be a lot of leaves to clean up if your plant does defoliate, mostly because your average Pachypodium doesn't have all that many to begin with. The down side is that they're harder to clean up than your average dropped leaf, because of their tendency to wedge themselves between, or impale themselves on, the thorns.

FEEDING: More or less what you'd expect. Light to normal for spring and summer, slow down in fall, don't feed in winter.

There are no cultivars of Pachypodium as far as I can tell: if there are varieties grown for the color of their flowers or the variegation on their leaves, I couldn't find any. There are also no thornless varieties, at least not of these species (other Pachypodium species may be less extreme, with the thorns), though on older plants, the thorns sometimes get broken off, leaving a smooth patch. I did find some pictures of a cristate plant, which is satisfyingly different, and even freakier and more alien-looking, but also probably not available for sale.

According to the movie, one's "heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others." This is really questionable logic (like the Wizard's other pronouncements, actually), but in this case, it kinda works. Spiny, complicated and poisonous though they are, people do love Pachypodiums. Myself included. Just, you know, tempered with a certain amount of respect. And fear.⁹

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Photo credits: Tin Woodsman photo via shawnnacox.com. Pachypodium pictures are my own.

¹ It was a fluke Wal-Mart thing: they had some with the little flowers glued on, which always makes me feel bad for the plant, and I'd wanted to try a Pachypodium anyway, so I picked one up, prepared to pay $3.97, and then when I got to the checkout, it scanned at $0.50. I said something about this to the cashier, she rang it out and then back in again, and it was still $0.50. Then she consulted briefly -- too briefly, really -- with another cashier and came back. She looked at me, I looked at her, we gave a mutual shrug, and then I paid my 53 cents. Oddly, a large chunk of the people who talk about either of the Pachypodiums at davesgarden.com (lamerei, geayi) say they got theirs at Wal-Mart too, and I don't think it's just because a lot of people buy a lot of things from Wal-Mart. Not that I have a theory about why Wal-Mart would be the national Official Box Store of Pachypodiums. Just something I noticed.
² It's a particularly mean trailing-type cactus (not an Aporocactus, though, or at least I don't think it is) that I really kind of hate and would love to be able to sell to somebody so that I never have to deal with it again.
³ When people talk about the number of species in a particular genus or location, even if the number given is a precise one, reality is often a bit more fluid than that, because taxonomists always have different ideas about whether to split similar-but-not-quite-identical populations off into a separate species or not. Also there may be species out there that have simply not been described yet, or there may be a species going extinct, or whatever. Hence, "25ish," rather than just 25. This is precisely the sort of thing that would have driven me absolutely insane as a child: I was very troubled by categories with fuzzy boundaries. I still don't like fuzzy boundaries, but I deal better than I used to.
⁴ The genus Dipladenia no longer exists; it was lumped together with Mandevilla. However, some growers (and very probably some customers also) have been unwilling to let the Dipladenia name rest in peace, and have resurrected it for specific Mandevilla cultivars even though it's still not the botanically correct name.
⁵ Also, a lot of people try to keep Mandevilla indoors, but from what I've read, this rarely goes well. They are extremely prone to spider mites and other pests, and if the bugs don't get you, the lack of light will. Not recommended. We actually have trouble keeping them in the greenhouse at any time of year, but they're particularly difficult during the winter.
⁶ Oleanders (Nerium) are particularly, famously toxic, but as best as I can tell, toxicity is a family characteristic and all of the Apocynaceae are poisonous to some degree or another. You wouldn't think that Pachypodiums would bother -- surely the gigantic spines would be deterrent enough -- but no, apparently there's something on Madagascar that could get around the spines.
⁷ Things to remember if you want to do this: plants, even desert plants, even desert plants that have been in full sun indoors all winter long, will still sunburn if you do not introduce them to outdoor light gradually. This means an hour one day, a couple hours the next day, a little more time the day after that, and so on. The reverse applies when you bring it back in in the fall. If you don't have the time or motivation to spend a week or two on the gradual thing, you have two options: one, you could just keep the plant in. Seriously. It's not that smart: it won't know that you're not letting it play outside with the other plants. Two, you could set it directly outside into some heavy shade and let it be. It'll still be getting more light than it probably would indoors, and it's a lot less likely to burn.
⁸ Another thing to remember: I had a customer last Friday who was looking for some new houseplants, but he kept telling me over and over that he'd had repeated problems with plants doing great for a few months, and then going into sudden declines, which he was blaming on Iowa (since in Louisiana, where he'd lived previously, this didn't happen). He shouldn't have been surprised by this: it's perfectly normal, and in fact maybe even expected, for a plant that's been growing in all the warmth, humidity, light and water it can handle to balk a bit at going inside for the winter. I suspect that the problem was impatience: a lot of people apparently assume that if a plant begins to fall apart, they have to do something about it, so they feed it, or water it more, or spray it for bugs, or something, not realizing that all of these things are likely to make the situation worse. And then they blame the plant for being difficult, or blame the state of Iowa, or whatever, when the plant is actually behaving perfectly sensibly for the situation.
⁹ Incidentally: the origin story of the Tin Woodman (not woodSman, originally) as presented by Frank Baum in the Oz books is that he was once a normal human person who chopped down trees. The Wicked Witch of the East enchanted his ax, so that it would chop off his limbs. This was somehow related to him being in love with a girl -- I don't know why the witch would care, but the purpose of the spell, in any case, was to prevent him from marrying. Each time he lost a body part, he would replace it with a tin prosthetic. Eventually there was nothing left of the original body, and everything had been replaced except for his heart, which was apparently overlooked in all the gore and metalworking, leaving him not only made of metal, but unable to love the girl he'd fallen for in the first place. This isn't really very related to the profile, but I couldn't bear not to include it once I found this out, as I'd never heard it before.

Work-related: Lizard

I was down on my hands and knees a couple days ago, weeding the greenhouse floor (This has to be done occasionally, and although everybody tells me that I could do it a lot faster if I used a tool to dislodge the roots and a rake to pull up the weeds, and although it actually is really uncomfortable, I prefer doing it by hand. I figure at the very least I'm not just turning them under the soil to re-root and grow again.), when I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye. Turned out to be this little guy, who sat surprisingly still while I took his picture. I was prepared to decline if he tried to sell me car insurance, but luckily, I never had to.


I assume he probably arrived on the last order of tropicals from Florida, which was two weeks ago. We've sprayed pesticide twice since then, so either this guy is very very sick now (which might explain the lack of car insurance pitches) or is able to withstand doses of insecticides that would drop average lizards. If it's the latter, I hope our superlizard is hungry for fungus gnats.

Pretty picture: Goodaleara Pacific Truffle 'Surrogate Star'

You know those spam e-mails that included a bunch of random bits and pieces of other text, in the hopes that this would fool spam filters into thinking it was a legitimate message? The name for this particular orchid reminds me of that. Nobody who didn't already know what it was could hope to have a chance of guessing what a "Pacific Truffle Surrogate Star" might be (some kind of marine organism? a famous gourmand?).



Is this necessarily bad? No, not necessarily, but if orchid growers are truly out of meaningful combinations of words, then they may as well just go ahead and just use numbers, because there's really no point to perpetuating this word salad. Memorizing a bunch of digits in some particular order is not appreciably more difficult than memorizing a bunch of unconnected words in some particular order.

But this is nothing against the plant itself, of course, which is a perfectly nice plant as plants go. Goodaleara (Gdlra.) is a new combination for me, this one being derived from genes of Brassia, Cochlioda, Miltonia, Odontoglossum, and Oncidium. It looks a lot like some of the other orchids we've encountered, particularly the Beallara Marfitch 'Howard's Dream.'

Unfinished business re: Davallia spp.

In the original Davallia profile, I said that I am not a Davallia taxonomist and do not know what sorts of things differentiate one species from another. Well. I'm still not a Davallia taxonomist, but after going to work and actually looking at some plants, I've discovered that in at least one instance, it's not that hard. Witness:

At work, we have two species of Davallia. One of them is tagged Humata instead, but I think there's a case to be made for calling it Davallia anyway, so I will. 'Cause that's just how I roll. So this one is Davallia "Humata" tyermanii:


And then this other one is Davallia trichomanoides:


Separately, they still look pretty similar, but when you get them side-by-side, the differences start to stand out a bit more:


This side-by-side comparison of fronds is not as dramatic as I'd hoped it might be, but here it is regardless:


The fronds of tyermanii are substantially stiffer and thicker; they're also a darker green in this particular case, but that could be because of the care these particular plants have received, not what species they are. Trichomanoides' fronds are also a little more deeply divided.

The "common names," according to the tags, are: white rabbit's-foot fern (tyermanii) and brown squirrel-foot fern (trichomanoides). The rhizomes don't look especially different to me, and I forgot to get a picture of them together, but the same general rule applies: the trichomanoides rhizomes might have slightly smaller, finer scales, but if there is a difference, it's very subtle. The rhizomes of both have new growth which is light gray to white, which ages to dark brown.

So now you should be able to tell at least these two apart. If I run across other species, we'll revisit the post again.

PATSP Learning Moment #2

When everybody tells you that Homalomena 'Selby' can never ever, under any circumstances, be allowed to dry out, believe them.

Random plant event: special Dieffenbachia flowering

I've posted pictures of Dieffenbachia flowers before, but nothing quite like these. Previously, for whatever reason, the flowers never actually fully developed. This might have been because the conditions weren't right for it, or it could have been because the plants in question never intended for them to develop all the way in the first place. Really don't know.

So when one of mine at home, a NOID that I've had for about three and a half years now, started to produce flowers a while ago, I wasn't really all that interested. Been there, done that.

Then the plant started doing something brand-new, that I've never seen a Dieffenbachia do before: it looked like it was putting two flowers together, one on top of the other, with a narrower "waist" in between. I pinched the bottom one a few times, just to try to figure out what was going on in there, and it was actually mostly hollow, just a stem inside a big balloon of a spathe.

And but then it got weirder, because the top section worked itself free, and then lower "flower" opened up:


And I was like, ooooooh. I've heard about this.

'Cause you see, when you look up Dieffenbachia or Philodendron or whatever -- aroids -- there will usually be something in there about how the flower spike usually contains both male and female flowers, which are separated spatially. Male on top, female on bottom, with a zone of sterile flowers in between. Previously, I'd always seen inflorescences like the one below (taken from a previous post):



and I'd assumed that when I looked at the white part at the top, I was in fact looking both the male and female flowers, with a zone between the two of sterile flowers, and it just happened that male, female, and sterile all looked identical. And whatever the hell the yellowy stuff below that was, it wasn't really relevant: some kind of misdeveloped flowers, perhaps.

But no. It turns out that two things were happening. One, I was oblivious to anything that was going on inside the spathe, and two, I never happened to be paying attention when the action was happening.

Oh yes. There is action.

Here is the part I'd always assumed was the whole "flower," the male part. It had, at this point, just emerged from the spathe:


And the following day, it was doing this:


That lasted no more than a day, after which the spathe popped back up around the spadix and sealed it back in again.

Meanwhile, the female part, which you can just barely see in that first picture, was doing stuff as well. It's much harder to photograph, because I have to hold the spathe open with one hand while I take the picture with the other, and so the quality is kind of crappy here, but you get the gist. The basic structure is clearly visible in the first picture:


And then the coloring is more true to life in the second:


This is also a very quick process. The next day, the colors and textures had changed:


And then it sealed itself back up again as well.

In nature, my understanding is that beetles pollinate these flowers. The plant attracts the beetles, the beetles crawl into the chamber around the female flowers (hence the need for a lot of space around them: the plant's making room for the beetles), and then . . . magic happens?, and the flower is pollinated. No account of the process I've read so far explains how or why the beetles pick up the pollen from the male flowers in the first place (they're not self-fertile, so it'd have to be coming from another flower), or how the beetles get back out after the deed is done (the seal on the spathe is tight, actually: I found it difficult to open up to try to look at the male flowers again), or what they do while they're in there. But at least the male-female-sterile part makes more sense now. I'm a little bit amazed that I hadn't run into pictures of this stuff before, and I'm a lot amazed that my plant decided to do this while growing inside: clearly it's adequate, but I would never have thought this was the ideal environment for growing and flowering.

Question for the Hive Mind: Exciting New Insect Pest

Particularly proud of this picture: I got it by photographing a hand-held magnifying lens with a hand-held camera in front of a wobbly Sansevieria and still got something approximating clear focus. Of course I also had to take ten pictures, too.
We got a new batch of tropicals in from Florida on 6 Nov., and found some of these on this one Sansevieria trifasciata. This is not the first time I've seen these; they're the same bugs (pretty sure) that were on my Trojan Sansevieria (story is at the whitefly profile, even though I've since concluded that they were not whiteflies).

The above is the best picture I'm capable of getting. Normally you can't see that much detail.

We've seen these on a variety of things, most of them relatively new arrivals:

Sansevieria trifasciata 'Laurentii,' 'Hahnii' (snake plant / mother-in-law's tongue)
Zamia sp. (cardboard palm)
Dracaena deremensis 'Janet Craig Compacta'
Dracaena deremensis 'Limelight'
unknown palm (I wasn't present when the infestation was diagnosed)
Cereus peruvianus (pic below)
Agave lurida

It took a while to conclude that they were probably coming from Florida, because, you know, you hate to make these accusations unless you've been watching the plants in question really closely. They seem to be easy to get rid of on Dracaena and more or less impossible to eliminate from anything else, no matter what you spray or how often you wipe off the plant or what you use to do either of those things. The damage seems to be mostly aesthetic: when removed, the bugs leave yellowish spots where they were, which are permanent, but thus far none of the plants affected have looked like they were in imminent danger of dying.

Particularly bad batch on a Cereus peruvianus. There's actual scale in this picture as well, which I think is probably not related but might be.
I sent a picture to our supplier, who checked with the grower, who claimed that they'd never seen these before and they'd have to get back to us about what they were. Which I suppose might not be a lie, but I am deeply skeptical.

So. Anybody (especially anybody in Florida who might be a little less clueless than the growers) have any ideas? The last time I spoke to her, the supplier said the growers think it's not scale.

Random plant event: Anthurium crystallinum 'Mehani' flower

Anthurium crystallinum 'Mehani' is, obviously, grown for the white-veined velvety leaves, rather than the flowers, which are so uninteresting that it verges on tragedy.

Still, even ugly flowers can be nice to see, if it means the plant's happy.

Pretty picture: Passiflora coccinea

Passifloras have never really done it for me, which surprises me as much as it probably surprises you. It's not that they're not pretty, but . . . well, I can't really give a reason. I don't know the reason. They just make me go ennh.

Until about a month ago, I didn't know that passion flowers came in any color besides purple, and up until about a year ago, I had no idea that anybody ever tried to grow them as houseplants. I still don't think very many people do, but WCW had at least one.

Of course, now that I think about it, I became aware that WCW had one at home because she brought it to the work greenhouse to overwinter, so it's possible that it didn't spend much actual time in her home (she puts everything, or at least almost everything, outside for the summer: I'm told her yard looks like a tropical rain forest that appears and disappears with the seasons), and therefore probably doesn't really count as a houseplant except very technically.

Iowa City Graffiti (Statue of Liberty)

I'm just not quite sure what to think about this. So many different things it could mean, good and bad.

Glinda, the Good Witch of the North (Davallia spp.)

(This is Part 3 of the Wizard of Oz series of plant profiles.)

My experience with ferns is somewhat limited, for two main reasons. The first is aesthetic: I tend to go for large, broad, more or less solid leaves (Dieffenbachia, Anthurium, Monstera, Aglaonema, Strelitzia) or else long, thick, strappy leaves (Dracaena, Yucca). There aren't a lot of small, delicate, fluffy-leaved plants in here.

The other reason for my limited fern experience is cultural. Most of the available ferns get ruled out for one reason or another: Adiantums are divas, Nephrolepis are horrible slobs, people seem to have wildly different experiences with Platycerium and I'm not willing to risk a bad one yet, I can't decide whether I like Polypodium or not, and most of the rest are either unavailable or unknown to me.

My main personal plant, at the moment. It's still a pretty recent acquisition.

And it's not like I haven't tried the occasional ferns anyway, but so far we've discovered that Aspleniums (bird's-nest) don't do well for me,¹ Cyrtomiums (holly) do well but are fairly coarse-looking, as ferns go (which may be one reason why I like them), and Davallias (rabbit's-foot) are the only other ones I've tried. And they do . . . okay, culturally, though they're not the easiest plant I've ever tried. And aesthetically, well, they don't have gigantic leaves, but the fronds actually look a lot like the generic "fern" picture that always gets trotted out when people talk about fractals.² And that's kinda cool.

So my (fairly loose) association for post purposes is, Davallias are a fairly benign, fluffy-looking group within the larger bad group "ferns," just as Glinda is a fairly benign, fluffy-looking individual within the larger bad group "witches."^{3, 4}

As with Glinda, too, there's a slightly sinister angle to Davallia,⁵ which are the creeping rhizomes which produce the fronds. I have had customers decline to buy them because the rhizomes made them uneasy for some reason. I think the rhizomes look enough like little paws or whatever that some people have a moment where animal and plant seem to be mixing in unpleasant ways. A fern with paws, a dog with roots, a cactus with humanlike hair,⁶ whatever, it all looks like the mixing of categories that shouldn't be mixed.

Close-up view of the rhizomes.

The genus Davallia comes from all over, sorta. Wikipedia gives the origins of several species as follows:

Davallia bullata - Japan, China, and tropical Asia.
Davallia canariensis - Canary Islands to Spain and north Africa.
Davallia divaricata (syn.: Davallia polyantha) - Tropical Asia.
Davallia fejeensis Hook (syn.: Davallia fijiensis) - Fiji Islands and Australia.
Davallia mariesii or "Squirrel's-foot fern" – tropical Asia and Malaysia
Davallia solida - Malaysia, Polynesia, and Queensland.
Davallia trichomanoides (syn.: Davallia dissecta) - Malaysia.

Sharp-eyed, geographically aware readers will note a certain Pacificness to the group (except for canariensis), but that's about the only sweeping generalization to be made. Presumably the unlisted thirty-odd species fill in the gaps between the Canary Islands and the Pacific Ocean somehow.

I am not a Davallia taxonomist, and do not actually know what species my own plants belong to. The best bet is probably fejeensis, which seems to be the one that gets mentioned the most when people bother to name a species, though trichomanoides and D. tyermanii also get mentioned quite a bit. That said, there's apparently some rearrangement taking place in the world of fern taxonomy, because we had a batch of rabbits-foot ferns come in with tags identifying them as Humata tyermanii. Very few sites are using this name, so for the time being I'm still going to call them Davallia.

Hanging basket at work. Hanging baskets are a little awkward, but they do allow one to show off the rhizomes better.

As best as I can determine, any tropicalish Davallia needs basically the same care as any other indoors:

LIGHT: Doesn't seem to be a huge issue, actually, though I wouldn't put one in a dim spot for long periods, or in full sun all day in a south window. My best results have been with either very bright artificial light (in the mini-greenhouse) or a few feet away from a south window, both of which fall into the bright indirect to filtered sun range. An east window would probably also work fine, though I haven't tried that because I don't have any. On-line sources mostly suggested filtered sun.
WATERING: These ferns are naturally epiphytes,⁷ or semi-epiphytes, so they are better adapted to take up water through the rhizomes than through the roots, and it's possible to overdo the watering. For this reason, you should relax about repotting your plants: it's probably not urgent to them. Aim for the pot to get about halfway dry between waterings, but slightly dryer than that in the winter and slightly wetter than that in the summer. You may mist lightly between waterings, as well. Overwatered plants' rhizomes will change color from silvery-gray to brown-black; this is often accompanied by a plague of fungus gnats.

The dark black sticklike thing that begins at the right-hand side of the white rhizome in the picture and continues back and to the left is a Davallia rhizome, and is probably too wet, though so far it's managing to hang in there, so I'm hoping that it will recover. You can see a little tuft of whitish rhizome at the very back of the photo that is new growth. It might still work out okay.

HUMIDITY: Somewhat of a big deal. If humidity is too low, parts of the fronds (particularly the tips and edges) will brown and die. They don't really have unreasonably high requirements for humidity, as ferns go, but putting one on a central heating vent will give you a dead plant in short order. Misting is not necessarily useful for raising humidity:⁸ I recommend moving the plant to a humid room (bathrooms and kitchens are usually the most humid parts of most houses), using a room humidifier, or setting up a pebble tray.
TEMPERATURE: Most of the sites I found that offered a suggestion on temperature agreed that 55ºF (ºC) was about the minimum for tropical Davallias. One notable exception (here) claimed that the plant would be fine into the teens. I'm not going to risk my plants that way, but if you want to do so, let me know how it turns out for you. Some non-tropical species (canariensis being an example) prefer cooler temperatures, but you're not likely to find these cool-weather Davallias for sale as houseplants.⁹

The rhizomes do branch.

PESTS: I've only ever seen one thing on Davallia, and I think that was kind of a fluke -- I had springtails once. Or at least I'm pretty sure they were springtails. I don't know whether they were actually causing the plant problems or not. Otherwise, I haven't seen anything serious. As mentioned above, fungus gnats will often appear if a plant is being overwatered. Mealybugs and scale are not impossible.
PROPAGATION: You can propagate in several different ways, but none have a particularly high success rate. It is difficult, but not impossible, to root cuttings of the rhizomes. I tried it once with fifty-seven cuttings, and two worked (success rate: 3.5%). I'm not sure what, specifically, was responsible for the failure: I haven't had another opportunity to experiment. Next time the opportunity comes up, though, I'm going to try vermiculite instead of soil,¹⁰ and do what I can to maintain a steadier level of moisture. Layering (rooting the rhizome in a new pot while it is still attached to the parent plant in the old pot) is said to work as well, and is supposed to have a higher rate of success than cuttings. Davallia spp. do produce spores, and can be grown from them, though this is apparently trickier than with some other types of ferns and nobody I've read on-line calls it the preferred means of propagation. (We've had some Davallias drop spores on the greenhouse floor and produce new plants, though, without even trying. So it may not be that hard.)

Top view of the pot of surviving cuttings. Doesn't look like much now, and probably won't anytime soon -- they're slow growers -- but this is much fuller than its looked at any point up to now.

GROOMING: Rabbit's-foots¹¹ aren't as messy as Bostons, but they do drop fronds on a pretty steady basis, particularly during the winter. It doesn't look all that bad, but if you're the type of plant owner who likes to have everything dead cleaned up at all times, Davallia is not the fern for you. I should also mention here that it is not a good idea to cover the rhizomes with soil, as they will rot: this makes repotting kind of tricky, as you can imagine.
FEEDING: I didn't see a lot of information about feeding, but the few people who did say something said that it's best to have a light touch. This makes sense, as epiphytic plants usually don't demand a lot of food. Also, I would assume (though nobody said this) that you can stop altogether between October and February. So feed lightly and/or infrequently, and skip winters.

Table at work; we just got a bunch of these in, and the mass of foliage was striking.

It's hard to sum these up very well. They're not the easiest ferns, they're not the hardest, they're not the neatest or the messiest or the anythingiest. But they're at least doable, and the fronds are attractive. I like them, but I don't recommend them to customers who are looking for ferns as much as I used to, because one, I recognize that they're not the easiest ones out there, and two, mostly what I find the customers want me to tell them is that they can keep a Nephrolepis going: for a lot of people, Bostons are the only ferns that really matter. Which is sort of too bad.

UPDATE: Also see the related unfinished business post, in which I figure out the difference between D. tyermanii and D. trichomanoides.

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Photo credits: All photos are my own, except for Glinda, which is from shawnnacox.com.

¹ Or, rather: they do fine for about six to nine months and then suddenly and catastropically begin to fall apart. This has happened twice now, and I'm thinking I'm not going to try a third time. I can't pick from the many possible explanations which one I think is responsible, but bad soil (why must ferns always be planted in peat moss?) and occasional missed waterings are fairly likely.
² Remember fractals? The 1990s were so 60s sometimes.
³ Not meaning "witches" as commonly understood at the moment; I mean "witches" as defined within the movie and as they would have been understood in 1939. I have some issues with Wicca and its practitioners, but these are irrelevant in the context of the movie. If there are Wiccans or Wiccan sympathizers in the audience who object to my use of the word "witches" in a negative fashion, I will meet you at least partway by agreeing that people who call themselves witches do not look or act like Margaret Hamilton's character in the movie, and are generally well-meaning people who are no less moral than the rest of us, and we should not burn them at stakes or become outraged if they speak to our children or etc.
⁴ Also noteworthy: Billie Burke, who played Glinda in the movie, was apparently fifty-three at the time. This is kind of mind-blowing to me for two reasons: one, I wouldn't have guessed it from looking at her in the movie (though I suppose it would be hard to guess the age of anybody in that dress and makeup), and two, it's hard to imagine anybody that age being cast in that part, were the movie being made now. Of course, there are a lot of things about the movie that would never get past the test audiences, if it were being made now.
⁵ It always kind of bothered me that Glinda shows up at the end and is all like, oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, you could have gone home whenever you wanted, I didn't tell you 'cause you wouldn't have believed me. I mean, I get that it's supposed to be a dream, and dreams don't have to make sense, but it's also a movie, and I kind of like it if characters in my movies have understandable motivations for what they do. That's all.

Of course, the ending is a little odd anyway: her big learning experience is that if it's not in her own back yard, she doesn't need to know about it? That . . . that's not a good lesson to be teaching people at all.
⁶ Which now that I've said all that about the Davallia-disliking people, I kind of wonder if this doesn't account for my own dislike of Cephalocereus senilis, the "old-man cactus," which otherwise seems pretty unobjectionable.
⁷ Like a surprisingly large number of other plants kept indoors, I'm realizing. Epiphyte, for those who don't know, is the word for plants which cling to branches of other plants, rather than anchoring themselves in soil. Many bromeliads (Aechmea fasciata and Tillandsia spp., e.g.) are epiphytes, as are some Anthurium species, Asplenium ferns, the bulk of orchids, etc.
⁸ This is kind of a controversial subject at Garden Web, and I assume also probably other places where people talk about houseplants. I personally think that while misting is probably better than nothing, it only increases the humidity for a few minutes at a time and is probably not worth doing unless you're willing to mist the clocks, carpet, books, bath towels, and everything else in your home as well. I'm not that big a fan of pebble trays, either, because I doubt that they can evaporate enough water quickly enough to make any real difference. Room humidifiers are really probably your best bet. Or you could, you know, put pans of water on every hot thing in your home (DVD player, radiator, dryer, TV set, oven). That might work too.
⁹ It's worth remembering that as the temperature goes up, the relative humidity goes down. This is basically meaningless for plants that are outside during the summer, but it's important to keep it in mind for indoor plants in the winter. If the plant is near a heat source (even an unintentional one, like a computer), the local relative humidity in that spot may be lower than it is in the room as a whole. This isn't to say that you should put your plant in a cold room so much as it's to say that humidity problems can actually be temperature problems, and vice-versa, and it's sometimes easier to change one than the other.
¹⁰ I have become convinced recently that vermiculite is the solution for all rooting-type problems. I have better luck with perlite for Ficus, but everything else so far (Begonia, Peperomia, Dieffenbachia, Pelargonium) does better in vermiculite. Though Peperomia caperata, at least, seems to do better in potting mix than in vermiculite or perlite either one. The biggest issue I've had with vermiculite is that it looks pretty much the same whether it's wet or dry, so sometimes I over- or under-wet it, which can cause problems, but soil is worse, so.
¹¹ Rabbit's-feet? Rabbits' foots?