Brain (Chlorophytum x 'Fire Flash')

And in the thrilling conclusion to the Breakfast Club plant series, we have . . .

More name confusion. The species name is given in different places as Chlorophytum amaniense, C. orchidastrum, or C. orchidantheroides, and a few places say it's a hybrid and just call it C. x 'Fire Flash.' We will be emulating the example of the last one there, because I have no way of figuring out who's right, and neither do you (probably),¹ and it's not the most important thing to nail down anyway. There's more confusion about the cultivar name: sometimes it's the poetic 'Fire Flash' or 'Fire Glory,' sometimes the bluntly descriptive 'Green Orange,' and occasionally the sort of opaque 'Mandarin Plant.' 'Fire Flash' seems to be the name by which it's most commonly known, so that's what we're going with here too.²

Care information for this plant on the web varies from site to site. I have not found it to have any really hardcore preferences whatsoever, though some sites disagree with me on that. I suspect that what all this confusion about names and care signifies is, it's relatively new to the industry (it seems to have first shown up in the late 1990s), and everybody just grows it in a way that's convenient for them and calls it whatever they think sounds best, and tries to inflict these preferences on everybody else. But I don't know for sure or anything.

What we have here is a relative of the spider plant, Chlorophytum comosum. It doesn't form runners and offsets, though: what it does instead is, it throws seeds everyfuckingwhere. The seeds don't have the best germination rate (in one set of 50 last winter, I got three to sprout; this seems to be more or less typical), but what they lack in vigor, they make up for in sheer quantity.


I couldn't come up with a picture of a flower: none of the ones at work or at home are in flower at the moment. If you've seen a spider plant flower, though, you've more or less seen it: the flowers are about 1/2 of an inch (1 cm) in diameter, white, and have six petals. They generally last a day. On 'Fire Flash,' the flowers are borne in groups, though, instead of singly like with C. comosum: a spike rises from the middle of the plant, flowers bloom and fade over a period of a week or so, and then each flower becomes a small triangular pod. (Flowers will form pods whether or not they're pollinated: like "Brian" in the movie, 'Fire Flash' is a virgin. At least usually.)

I don't know of any way to make the plants flower: both of mine were either already in flower when I bought them, or flowered right after I got them (which was in December), and neither has shown any inclination to go again in the year since. It's possible that they only flower once, but I'd guess that they probably just have particular environmental triggers that I haven't provided. The ones at work in the greenhouse haven't flowered since I've been there either. Maybe it's a day-length thing. (UPDATE: See this post for more about flowering.)

Spider plants also get these pods, occasionally, which I didn't realize until very recently: it seems to be a family characteristic, though spider plants' pods are beige to light orange, and 'Fire Flash' gets pods which are the same pink-orange color as its stems. The pods can remain on the plant for a long time: though they will eventually, left to their own devices, go black/brown and dry up, this can take weeks. It seems to be okay to cut off the flower spike after a couple weeks of waiting, which will make the pods dry up faster; I don't know if this affects the germination rate or not.

Seedling, roughly 9 months old
Each pod contains three rows of seeds, which are small (about 2 mm across), rounded, and black. Each row has three to five seeds in it. Plants seem to vary a lot in how many pods they produce per flowering, but 30-70 is more or less the range. If you do all the math, like a Brain would, you can see that one flowering is good for roughly 270-1050 seeds, which even at a germination rate of 3 in 50, means that you could expect one flower spike to get you between 16 and 63 new plants.

Getting the seeds out is relatively simple: when the pods turn black, they also become crumbly. You can open them up with a pair of tweezers and shake out, or pull out, the seeds.³ If seeds are kept in a dry, room-temperature spot, they seem to last for quite a while, though I assume the germination rate declines over time, and they can develop mold even in dry storage. I'm testing a batch of seeds now to see if mold makes them less sproutable. (UPDATE: It does. If they're moldy, toss 'em out. You can always get more.)

As far as sowing seeds goes, I've always just sprinkled them over damp soil and then covered them with a very light layer of dry. Nothing more complicated than that. Sometimes I don't even bother with the layer of dry soil. Judging from work, what's more successful is to throw them back in with the parent plant and go on about your business: I don't know if this actually improves the germination rate or not, but it's easier to get the soil moisture right for germination if you don't have to think about it at all, and if it's in with the parent, you don't have to think about it at all. If the flower spike is not removed, plants will self-sow eventually regardless, as we can see in this plant from work:⁴


Self-sown plants in the soil of an older plant

I transplanted my seedlings to individual pots when they got their third leaves, which is about three months after sowing, give or take a few weeks. Seedlings lack the orange coloration until they're about six months old and about three inches across, at which point they're still tiny, but they start looking like small versions of the plant they came from.

But wait! There's more!



In addition to being absurdly prolific, which would be a smart enough thing for a plant to do, 'Fire Flash' is also very difficult to kill. It tolerates very low levels of light. It also tolerates high levels, though with too much light the leaves will develop hideous black patches or bleach out to an unhealthy-looking yellow, usually both at once, so it's best not to get carried away.

'Fire Flash' is so easygoing about watering, I don't even know what it might prefer. Water it every day, water it every six months: it doesn't seem to have an opinion. I mean, I know it must have a breaking point somewhere, but I don't know what it would take. The secret to drought survival is, apparently, the little root nodules visible in the above photo, which store water. They have about the same texture and consistency as a potato,⁵ but as far as I've been able to determine, they aren't capable of sprouting new plants like potatoes are: they store water, and maybe starch, and that's all they do. On-line consensus seems to be to keep the plants fairly moist, but if you miss a week, or two, or five, don't sweat it.

Humidity levels are a big point of disagreement on-line, with some sites insisting that 'Fire Flash' has to have 40% humidity, minimum, in order to do well, and others not mentioning humidity at all. I can't say I've seen any evidence that the plants care about this either, and 40% isn't all that much anyway, so I'm inclined to say this isn't worth going to any trouble over. (If you see a lot of black leaf tips, you might try misting just to see if it helps.) Air temperature also doesn't seem to be a big deal, though one site says that they suffer chilling injury (undescribed, of course) if temperatures go below 50ºF for more than 12 hours, and I suspect I've lost leaves here and there from cold damage on the plants at home, which are near a cold window.

In fact, the only serious issue I have with these is grooming: the petioles ("stem" connecting the leaf to the stalk) are brittle and easily broken. Because of this, it's not a good plant for high-traffic spots. Old flower stalks go black and become unsightly, and need to be removed. Any tear in a leaf or break in a petiole will develop black marks outlining the injury. Unwanted seedlings may pop up in the pot from time to time in older plants, though that's minor: the only reasons you might care are 1) if you want some smaller plants or 2) if the seedlings get tall enough to cover up the orange stems on the parent. Black scorch marks appear on plants in very strong light, or in cold temperatures, and some of the plants at work have burnt tips and some don’t. So there is some maintenance, which is not intense but is constant.

I have seen the claim on-line that this plant, like Chlorophytum comosum, is extremely sensitive to fluoride and will develop black splotches and tips if you even talk about fluoride on the phone while in the plant's vicinity. I think this is probably overstated, but it's something to keep in mind if you have plants that are consistently getting black tips: make sure they're not hot, cold, or getting too much light, and then if that doesn't work, try humidifying and using distilled water. I water my own plants with fluoridated tap water, and they do have brown tips, even though I flush the soil at each watering. Whether there's a cause-effect relationship there, I don't know, but it doesn't bother me enough to try to change what I'm doing: the tips aren't that pronounced. Anybody whose experiences differ significantly from what I've described here is encouraged to comment or e-mail.

Clay pots might be helpful with respect to the fluoride issue, since they do have a tendency to concentrate minerals outside the pot. The main reason my larger 'Fire Flash' are in clay pots, though, is because the colors of the pot and plant match really well and I think this looks nice. Granted that as the pots age, the match is increasingly imperfect. But oh well.

It bugs me sometimes, a little bit, that more people aren't interested in this plant. They don't sell well, and I feel bad for them. At the same time, I understand. It's difficult for us to keep them looking nice: they especially suffered this summer, when the greenhouse got hot – and the fact that we had several of them in high-light spots didn't help either. I felt kind of the same way about Brian, in the movie – it didn't seem fair that everybody else pairs off and he's stuck writing the essay.⁶ With any luck, we'll figure out a way to keep them cooler and darker this summer, and people will realize that they're not that bad, but I suppose it can't take very long to saturate the market on 'Fire Flash,' either. If they're hard to kill, and everybody can make as many of their own as they could possibly want . . . maybe they're not really the plant to stake a business on. I dunno.

In any case. I think what we've learned here is that each of us is really a Ficus, and a Monstera, and a Murraya, and a Philodendron, and a Chlorophytum. Or something like that. As much fun as this has been, I'm not in any big hurry to try something like it again. Some of these were hard. Though ever since the comments for Criminal, a few days ago, I'm kicking myself over not doing the self-heading Philodendrons as the girls from Heathers, so . . . well, so I'm not saying it couldn't happen again.

UPDATE: Here's a link to an Unfinished business post on this plant, which includes a picture of the actual flower and some seed pods.

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Photo credits: Anthony Michael Hall: from leavemethewhite.com; all others: my own.

¹ But hey, if you do, drop me a line.
² There is an outside chance that the different names might refer to actual different cultivars, though all the pictures I've ever seen look like the same plant to me, regardless of what they were called. The differences, if any, must be damned subtle.
³ The seeds roll, so it's good to do this over a plate or something, if you're interested in maximum seedage.
⁴ We have little incentive to pull the seedlings. They could be potted up on their own and sold, but there are so many of them, and the plants are just not strong sellers. So they sit in there with the parent.
⁵ I have, in fact, been tempted to nibble on one, just a little, just to see what it's like. It'd probably be safe – Chlorophytum species aren't renowned for being toxic in the way that Dieffenbachia or Euphorbia tirucalli are – but it's probably just as well I've been able to resist so far, 'cause you never know.
⁶ A lot of my feelings on Brian in the movie are because that's who I would have related to best, in high school (college too, as far as it goes). I was a Brain, and most of my friends were Brains, Basket Cases, or both at once. Occasionally there was a Princess or Criminal. The Athletes were underrepresented because I was completely unable to relate to them and far too attracted to them, both of which bring down the quality of conversation.

Criminal (Philodendron x 'Autumn')

Okay. So here's where things start to get a little weird. What could it mean to call a plant a "criminal?" What laws do plants break? What laws could plants break?

I mean, I suppose you could call invasive or weedy species "outlaw plants," if you wanted, and there's also the possibility that pot-breakers should be punished in some legal fashion, but, I don't know, somehow this wasn't a satisfying way of looking at the situation, to me, and anyway I've already done those particular plants, so I'd have to come up with something different.

So let's take a step way the hell back and ask ourselves what the contract actually is between a person and a houseplant. At first glance, it seems like the obligations are mostly on the human's side: we agree to water, feed, defend against insects, clean, mist, prune, and so on and so forth. But, the plant, in turn, is expected to: grow, keep itself more or less presentable, reproduce when requested to do so, and not give in overly easily to the attentions of others, by which we mostly mean bugs. In other words, the plant is more or less expected to be a 1950s TV housewife, but without the vacuuming-in-pearls business.¹

In that light, a criminal plant would be the opposite: unattractive, no growth, unpropagatable, bug-prone, some kind of terrible joke of a plant that thinks you're just swell and everything but would really rather be out burning its bras and taking drugs with those dirty, dirty hippies.

Ahem. Perhaps I've let the metaphor get away from me. But still, you see the thought process. And in those terms, for me, there is really only one plant that's even competitive for the Criminal slot, and that is Philodendron x 'Autumn.'


Those of you who know me will have been expecting Syngonium podophyllum, and it's true that Syngonium and I have had our share of difficulties, but the problems were really entirely my fault: once I learned that it was all my fault, we've been getting along better. Not perfectly, but well enough that Syngonium doesn't qualify. Philodendron x 'Autumn' does.

I have had this plant for almost a year now (I bought it on January 6, 2007, so we've only got two or three weeks left before we hit an anniversary.). In that time, it has come as close to doing absolutely nothing as I think a plant can. Hell, even my Zamioculcas zamiifolia eventually grew a leaf, and propagated. 'Autumn' lost three leaves, and gained four, and that is all.

And it doesn't even look especially presentable:


As with the corresponding character in The Breakfast Club ("John Bender"), Autumn's problems are not entirely of its own making. There's been a little abuse, much of it inadvertent. I repotted it as soon as I got it home, just as I had done a few months prior with some similarly-sized 'Moonlight' Philodendrons (which had done beautifully for me, by the way, and are still looking quite fetching even as I type), and waited.

Eventually it became apparent that there was Something Wrong. It was staying wet after waterings way longer than it should have, like two or three times longer than the 'Moonlights.' A soil inspection turned up the fact that the poor thing had basically no roots anymore, and furthermore was in soil that would have been too heavy and wet for a perfectly healthy plant (if I'm remembering right, it would probably have been straight Miracle Gro), and had rocks blocking its drainage holes anyway.² So it got brand-new, somewhat improved soil, and then, to my everlasting shame, I stuck it back into the four-inch plastic pot which had been too large and water-retaining for it in the first place. I don't know what I was thinking. Maybe I didn't have anything smaller at the time.

But otherwise, it got reasonably good treatment. It was watered when the top inch or two was dry (however infrequently that happened), it got decent light and a fair amount of warmth (it was certainly never cold), I never saw any bugs on it. And all it could ever muster were these little tiny leaves about two inches long, some of which never even unrolled all the way.

So eventually I took it out of the pot again, to see what was up, and – it still has no roots to speak of. Just a two-inch taproot, nothing more. So. I moved it down again, into a still smaller pot (now a three-inch square),³ and still we wait.

'Autumn' is rumored to be the most difficult of the four cultivars in its little clique: 'Autumn' is bad, 'Prince of Orange' can be reasoned with sometimes but is still kind of fussy, 'Moonlight' and 'Imperial Red' are everybody's buddies. I don't have any idea why this is: it makes no sense to me. (Your results may vary anyway.)

Consequently, though, 'Autumn' rates a much higher difficulty level. My experiences aren't necessarily typical, but I've heard enough things from enough people to make me think that it likes to be somewhat drier (hence: more rot-prone, more drought-resistant) and better-lit than 'Moonlight.' Not that doing those things will help you, if it decides you're not worthy of its respect: then it'll just make fun of your wardrobe and tear up a library book. But it's something you can try nevertheless. I suspect, too, that this is one of those plants like Dieffenbachia spp., where some people find it terribly easy and will read this whole piece thinking I'm insane, while others find it impossible no matter what they do and will be nodding their heads as they go. There are a few plants like that. (Pothos is another one: mine are all falling apart on me lately.)

In the greenhouse, 'Autumn,' 'Prince of Orange,' 'Moonlight,' and 'Imperial Red' all behave more or less the same: I haven't noticed any of them being more problematic than any of the others. Only at home has there been a difference. So it could be that I'm making too big a deal of the differences, and I just happened to get a specimen of 'Autumn' that was a bit of a bum. Time will tell. For right now, it's doing only as much work as necessary to keep me from throwing it in the trash, and that won't be enough to save it indefinitely. Watch your back, 'Autumn.'

EDITED 5/13/08: Decreased difficulty level from 5.1 to 4.4 after the combination of downpotting and public humiliation seemed to turn the plant around (see this post). It's still more difficult than the similar Philodendrons, but it looks like a lot of the mess was my fault.

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Photo credit: Judd Nelson: from leavemethewhite.com; all others: my own.

¹ (Or, looked at in a more sinister way: 1950s housewives were expected to be potted plants, more or less, except that they also had to do chores.)
² Whether or not to put rocks in the bottoms of your pots "for drainage" is between you and your god(s): I won't tell you that you have to or that you shouldn't. There's a lot of disagreement about the practice: some people always do it, for everything, all the time, and other people never do it because they believe it to be harmful. I personally fall mostly in the latter camp, though I make exceptions in the event that one is trying to move a plant from a standard-proportioned pot to an unusually tall and skinny one, in which case having rocks or clay shards or something in the bottom might well improve the inevitable center-of-gravity issues that this kind of pot always has. And there's also something to be said for doing something besides setting the plant down on top of six inches of wet, rootless soil, which couldn't possibly end well. The simpler way of dealing with this, though, is to just not use such a tall and narrow pot in the first place.
I myself always stuck stones in the bottom of pots for years, because my mother did and I assumed that that meant it was useful for something. In actuality, though, I think it generally either does nothing or impedes drainage, usually the former.
³ Did you know that round pots are measured by the diameter across the top, but square pots are measured by the length of the diagonal, by industry convention? A "three-inch" square pot is a square with sides 2.1 inches long. This leads to all kinds of chaos and confusion.

Princess (Murraya paniculata)

This plant was my husband's decision. He doesn't choose plants for us very often, but about a year ago (Dec. 29, in fact), we were at the greenhouse where I now work, and he saw this, and decided he wanted it. And I was all like, no, no, are you kidding, it's $50, and we'll never be able to keep it alive more than a few months, but he ignored me and bought it anyway, as sometimes happens. And so naturally it's turned out to be one of my favorite plants, which means that now, it pretty much gets everything it wants, all the time, and I have to admit that I was wrong every time I tell this story, which is relatively often. (Though I was still right about the Hedera helix, which he bought at about the same time. So there.)

The plant is, by now, a bit spoiled. During the summer, I was watering it about every three days, which may not sound unreasonable until you consider that this is a huge plant, in a big (three-gallon?) pot:


And it was actually using that much water, too. Heavy watering kept it alive for quite a while, but it never bloomed as much as it did when we first got it, until I started feeding it. First I was feeding at half-strength, every month or so. And what I noticed was that it started blooming about every month or so. So then I started feeding at every watering, again in half-strength, and then it bloomed all the time. So then I started watering at full-strength with every watering, and – it kinda stopped, actually. I think the issue is that I did this at the same time that we had a bunch of cold, gray days outside, and so it had the food but not the light. In any case, it's the only plant that I feed that often, or make a point of feeding at all, because it's the only one that responds when I do.

Light is also important if you want it to bloom: ours here has gotten one of the coveted front-and-center spots in the only south window, because that's what it wanted and it tends to get what it wants. Often, buds will form all over the plant after a feeding and watering, but only the ones facing the window will develop and open, at least until the plant gets rotated.

The rest of the care is not terribly hard. Full sun, lots of food and water, but temperature is not a big deal: according to one site, it's hardy outdoors to 28ºF, and can be grown outdoors in zone 9b, so I think we can assume that any indoor temperature should be fine. I've worried about the humidity from time to time, but it hasn't seemed to have any problems with that, even in the winters when it's dry in here. It will dump a bunch of leaves if the soil gets too dry, which are a pain to pick up, and the flowers wind up all over the floor all the time when the plant is happy (individual flowers last only two or three days), so it gets some difficulty points added for grooming.

The leaves are dark green and naturally stay shiny. Growth is slow, but fairly consistent throughout the year.

The flowers smell more or less identical to orange blossoms (my mother's comment recently was that "it smells like Texas," referring to the orange groves all over the lower Rio Grande Valley where we used to live, and she came up with this before I told her that the plants were related). I've gotten sufficiently accustomed to the smell that it's starting to just smell like "home" to me: unless there's been some kind of terrible incident, the Murraya is usually the first smell I notice when I come through the door, and it's in bloom often enough that there's an association built-up. It's nice to come home to.

The first set of flowers we got turned into small (less than an inch long) reddish fruits after the petals fell off; most of the flowers in subsequent batches, and all the flowers for at least the last nine months, have failed to fruit and I'm not sure why. I kept some of the early fruits, thinking that seeds could be planted and all that, but they went moldy almost immediately so I pitched them. It turns out, after some investigation, that moldy fruit may still contain viable seeds, but the plant hasn't given me another chance in a very long time, so unless and until it decides I've learned my lesson, that information is kinda useless to me. Everything I've read about propagation suggests that cuttings are not easily done and have a high failure rate, but seeds are relatively easy (though the plant will not flower until it's at least a year or two old, and seedlings aren't quick growers). I tried rooting a cutting once, some time ago, and it didn't go anywhere, though that was before the mini-greenhouse.


Murraya paniculata also has a long association with human beings. It's native from India, south and east to Pakistan, China (reflected in one of the common names, "Chinese box") and the Philippines, and then south through Malaysia, Indonesia, and into Australia. It is used as an outdoor ornamental, frequently as a hedge, in all kinds of tropical climates, with the predictable result that it is an invasive species in many islands of the South Pacific (including Hawaii), non-native areas of Australia (primarily Queensland), and south Florida: birds spread the seeds by eating the fruits.¹

Humans have used the twigs as chew-sticks for cleaning teeth, the leaves for flavoring food, and various parts of the plant as treatment for dysentery and minor aches. The leaves are said to have an astringent effect, and so are used in the healing of wounds. Couldn't actually vouch for any of these practices personally, but the food-flavoring part interests me. (Actually, the minor-aches part interests me too: everything has been hurting, especially my head and neck, for the last two or three days. I don't know if I'm getting sick or what. Even if I am, I'm not sure I'm ready to start gnawing on the houseplants just yet, but I'm not going to rule it out.)

The wood is said to be used occasionally in woodcarvings or furniture, though this is not common because it's not economical: the plant just doesn't grow quickly enough.

The plant is used in bonsai a lot more than I ever suspected, too, because it will sprout from old wood after being cut back and isn't that tough to care for or induce to flower. (I admit to being a little puzzled about how one gets it to flower without feeding, or how one maintains it as a bonsai if one is feeding it enough to get it to flower. I'm also puzzled about why you'd want it to flower – the flowers aren't huge, but they're big enough that it seems like they'd be way out of proportion in a bonsai setting. Clearly more investigation is needed.)

Murraya also has connections to some interesting culture: this site says that in Javanese culture, the plant is said to be capable of warding off witchcraft, bad luck, and the devil himself.² The story I find more congenial is from the specific Javanese site of Jogjakarta Sultanate, where the king always stopped to think by a Murraya tree before entering the palace hall for a meeting, so that the plant became associated with wisdom and contemplation.³ 'Cause, I mean, if you're looking for a way to banish devils and witchcraft, you could do a lot worse than taking some occasional quiet time to think about stuff.

I'm just saying.

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Photo credits:
Molly Ringwald: from leavemethewhite.com; all others: my own.

¹ The fruits are said not to be edible by people, but I doubt that means that they're toxic, just that they don't taste good. Incidentally, nothing I ran across suggested that any part of this plant is toxic to pets or children, which should be of interest to readers with one or both.
² This has not been my experience, at least in the bad luck department: I have about as much bad luck now as I ever did. It does seem to be effective as a devil repellent, though: I have spotted no devils in nearly a year. It is also an effective thermonuclear bomb repellent, elephant repellent, and great-white-sharks-falling-from-the-sky repellent. It is less effective at warding off loss of employment and drunken college students, though in fairness, I don't think there's anything that can repel drunken college students.
Related note: Our upstairs neighbors just came back from wherever they've been for the last few days, and started up a drunken party with bongo drums at about 10:15 PM last night. This would be less problematic if they had longer attention spans, or any kind of natural rhythm whatsoever, but instead the drums start and stop, get louder and softer, arrive on, just before, or just after the beats, and come in 90-second segments before morphing into some other pattern, so it's impossible to try to sleep through. We called the cops, because it sounded like there were several of them (guys, not drums -- we think there are only one or two drums) and they were drinking and yelling, and also because anybody who doesn't understand that bongo drums at 10:15 PM in an apartment building is a bad idea is probably not going to respond to reason anyway. To their credit, they stopped pretty immediately. I personally hope that they stopped immediately because they all spent the night in jail for underage drinking, but that's because I am a mean, mean fucker when I can't get to sleep when I want to sleep.
³ Well, wisdom, contemplation, and royalty, let's note.

Athlete (Monstera deliciosa)

The connection here, if you want to be picky about it, is kinda shaky. Monsteras don't do anything especially athletic. I mean, it's not like they run or swim or ride bicycles.¹ But they do climb, and there's something about them – the size of the leaves, the thickness of the trunks, the overall robustness of the plants – that made this seem like a reasonable connection, and it's not like there were other plants that made any more sense (I considered Dieffenbachia spp. too, but I have another "person" in mind for them, eventually, after this Breakfast Club thing is over.), so there you go.

I went through a serious Monstera phase a little over a year ago, and then had a resurgence of enthusiasm in late winter 2007. They're not good plants to get obsessive about. I mean, don't get me wrong, they're nice plants, but they get huge. If you're prone to collecting plants, this is not a good way to go: now I have three big plants in 8-inch pots, and almost no places to put them where they could be happy. And they're only getting bigger.

Like the corresponding character in the movie, Monstera deliciosa pretty much just does what it's told. You put it in a hanging basket, it'll hang and get huge:

Photo: my own.
Give it something to climb, and it'll climb and get huge:

Photo: Raul654 at the Wikipedia entry for Monstera deliciosa.
Want variegation? Consider it done. Hugely.

Ask it for food, and it'll give you an edible fruit . . . though not right away: it takes a year to ripen, and however long to convince it to flower. Even the most people-pleasing plants have their limits. But still. The flowers are – you guessed it - huge:

Photo: A9l8e7n at the Wikipedia entry for Monstera deliciosa.
Photo: Bozejmonstera at the Wikipedia entry for Monstera deliciosa.
and the fruit (which is huge!) tastes like some kind of cross between pineapple, banana, jackfruit, and mango, which I assume is the plant's way of yet again trying to be all things to all people:²

Photo: B. navez at the Wikipedia entry for Monstera deliciosa.
The fruit is not likely to be a commercial crop anytime real soon, as it's very slow to develop (a lot of things could go wrong in a year of storage: it seems like that fact alone would make commercial fruit producers a little skittish), and unripe fruit is poisonous in roughly the same way that a Dieffenbachia is: immediate pain and swelling, itching, and blistering. Whether this is ever life-threatening, I don't know, but it seems unlikely that there's a place in the world market for a potentially painful fruit that takes a year to ripen and tastes just like everything else anyway. There are, even so, reports of the occasional regional recipe, like the Halloween dish "West Indian Pumpkin Pound Cake with a Monstera Mash Anglaise" mentioned here, in passing (sadly, there's a book you apparently have to buy before you get the recipe. I give him/r points for cleverness, though, for making it a Halloween dish so the "monster mash" pun could be used.).

It is, of course, very unusual for a plant to flower and set fruit indoors. So let's don't get carried away.

The plant has a number of unusual adaptations to its natural habitat (It's an understory plant in rainforests from Mexico south to Panama.). The most obvious one is the perforated leaves, which are pretty obviously a compromise between the need to have a lot of leaf area, to maximize light collection, and the need to minimize wind resistance during intense storms. Perforations allow wind to flow through without making the leaves completely useless for light collection.

Photo: my own.
Other plants have had different ideas on the matter: the bananas and bird of paradise, Musa and Strelitzia species, respectively, go ahead and grow gigantic leaves but make them in a way such that they tear themselves to strips in high winds, leaving all the leaf area still available for light collection but with no more wind resistance than a palm frond. Philodendron bipinnatifidum uses a similar approach, but builds the tears into the leaf from the beginning. Maple trees, Acer, have gone a whole different way, by constructing the leaves so that they fold into cones in high winds,³ which reduces drag and also reduces wear and tear.

Another notable adaptation, which I personally think is like the coolest thing ever, is that when a Monstera seedling first sprouts, it exhibits negative phototropism, also called scototropism (scoto being the Greek root for darkness or blindness), growing in whichever direction is darkest. Why? Because that's where the tallest tree trunks are going to be, and once it can find a tree trunk, it can scramble up and get good light. If it had to make a living from what light is available on the forest floor, it'd be screwed.

The aerial roots are a related phenomenon. From a houseplant-growers' perspective, aerial roots are kind of annoying: they're not what you'd call pretty,⁴ and if you can't bend them toward a source of moisture (they're brittle, like the rest of the plant, so until they get to a certain length, it's difficult to get them to go where you want without breaking them), they just hang there, useless. They can be cut off, with no harm to the plant, though I generally try to leave mine alone. In the wild, of course, the aerial roots can acquire some additional moisture, and incidentally anchor the plant (which brings us back to the whole high-winds situation), but even there, aerial roots don't seem to be required so much as just frequently handy.

Care is relatively straightforward: because they are adapted to survive in the understory of the rainforest, light levels are negotiable. They like sun, if you can swing it, but if not, don't worry about it, they'll make do. The same goes for heat and humidity, pretty much: you're not going to get a giant plant, or fruit, without a lot of light, heat and humidity, but if you're just wanting the plant to stay alive, you can do almost anything you like. They are a little touchy about cold (the growers' guide, oddly, doesn't mention Monstera, but from observation at work, I'm thinking they're okay as long as they stay above about 55ºF / 13ºC.).

Watering is the one area I have difficulty with, and especially lately: I have a tendency to overdo watering on aroids in general,⁵ but I'm especially bad about this with Epipremnum aureum and Monstera deliciosa. Part of the problem is that I have mine in those plastic pots with the saucers that can pop on and off: this is a good idea in theory, but they don't drain as well, since the bottoms of the pots usually only have like four smallish drainage holes in the first place (as opposed to eight larger ones in a grower pot), and then two of those get plugged up when you attach the saucer. So it's not the same as trying to grow a plant in a pot with no drainage, but it's not as different as it ought to be.

Photo: my own.
I've tried drilling additional holes in the bottoms of the pots, which mostly breaks them (They're prone to breaking anyway: just pulling the saucers free from the pot has cracked several of mine, and then they leak, which makes me all kinds of angry), and I hate to repot the Monsteras because they took a long time to settle down when I moved them the first time.⁶

The point of all this being – since I tend to overwater aroids anyway, and since my Monsteras are in a drainage situation where they're likely to hold water for a lot longer than they should, and since they continue, however reluctantly, to survive, I'm thinking that they're able to handle a certain amount of overwatering. Though it's still probably best to let them dry to somewhere between one-fourth and one-half dry before giving them water again. Possibly even less.

One more parallel with the character in the movie ("Andrew"): Monsteras are horrible at thinking for themselves. In the wild, where they have all the heat and moisture to draw on, they can scramble up a tree with the best of them, but indoors, you generally have to tell them where to step. The ideal arrangement is said to be a mesh pole of some kind, filled with sphagnum moss or some other material that can be kept damp: the mesh permits one to guide the aerial roots into the pole, and the plant can anchor itself, and the damp moss inside the pole gives the plant the motivation. I've never been lucky enough to find a pole like this when I needed one, so I've had to make do with a pole made of plastic, with a half-inch layer of coir (coconut fiber) wrapped around it, and tie the plants to the pole. I don't think any of the plants have taken to this particularly well, mostly because coir doesn't really hold water at all, but even if I had found one of these poles in time, I couldn't afford to add water to it very often because of the aforementioned inadequate drainage situation. The ones at work get tied up, too, except for the few in hanging baskets. They don't seem to object too much.

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Photo credits:

Emilio Estevez: from leavemethewhite.com; all others: see text.

¹ To my knowledge, anyway. I suppose we can't rule out a little bit of bike-riding.
² In fact, all the accounts I ran across mentioned pineapple, and most of them mentioned banana, so I'm assuming that those are probably the dominant flavors. Still, it's called "fruit salad plant" once in a while, so it's not really supposed to taste like any particular thing.
³ Check it out, if you can find a leaf that's fresh enough to be pliable. They do.
⁴ Unless you have unusual tastes, I guess: I shouldn't make blanket statements like that about what people will think is pretty.
⁵ They just look so damn tropical that I assume they must be thirsty. Sadly, this logic, while satisfying to my brain, doesn't travel to the real world very well.
⁶ Which failure to settle may well have been because I stuck them in a pot that didn't have as much drainage as I thought.

Basket Case (Ficus benjamina)

I'm going to attempt something in the next several plant profiles, which is possibly too cute for words and therefore not really worth doing, but you know me, always pushing the envelope. So this is going to be the first of a series of five plant profiles constructed around the movie The Breakfast Club. Why? Well, it sort of had to happen sooner or later. I mean, how perfect, for a blog built on archetypes/stereotypes, is a movie full of pretty people who are all fictional examples of five arche-/stereotypes? I mean, come on. It's so perfect.

So there will be, in some order, an Athlete, a Brain, a Princess, a Basket Case, and a Criminal. This may take a while to get to; I'm having some difficulty coming up with much to say about the plant I was going to use for the Brain. So there may be the occasional non-Breakfast Club profiles until I can get it together. And we'll see how that goes.

Because Ally Sheedy is my favorite (except at the end of the movie where Molly Ringwald pretties her up: she was waaaaaaaay more interesting before and should have been left the hell alone. But I still like her best, even after.), we're going to start with Basket Case, which means Ficus benjamina, which you knew because it's written a few inches above this in big letters and you read it already.

Why Basket Case? Well. Ficus benjamina is famous for dropping tons of leaves at once over minor changes, or major changes, or because it's Tuesday, or whatever. And everybody thinks that this is a totally arbitrary thing, that this is just how they are, or whatever, but this is not really true.

My own personal Ficus benjamina 'Midnight.'
'Cause, I mean, think about it. This was a plant growing just fine in the wild at one point, right? Still is, even, as far as I'm aware. So what use could be served, if you're a plant in the wild, to just drop tons of leaves all at once over nothing in particular? Nothing. It's a slightly different thing to drop leaves in preparation for the winter, and it is my understanding that F. benjamina is in fact naturally somewhat deciduous,¹ though it never actually drops all the leaves at once and the drop is not arbitrary: it's driven by the seasons and moisture levels. Arguments from incredulity are dangerous: any time you start a sentence with, "It's difficult to imagine why," you're leaving yourself open to contradiction by someone who has a better imagination, which will make you look stupid. But I don't see a way around it. It's difficult for me to imagine a way it serves the plant to do what everybody says it does.

And if we take that as a given, then we're left with the question, well, does it even do what everybody says it does? Does it really drop all its leaves just because it's Tuesday?

The answer, as I suspect you're suspecting, is no. Of course not. Garden Webber The Great Tapla the All-Knowing and All-Seeing, Destroyer of Worlds,² says that massive leaf drop on an indoor plant is almost invariably due to a decrease in light intensity (or some other decline in conditions)³, and happens with nearly perfect predictability if you watch for it. And bless me, he seems to be right. I bought a F. benjamina 'Midnight' recently, and when I brought it home I had to put it in a spot where it was getting light from one side but not the other: I think every leaf it dropped was on the dark side. This has also tended to be the pattern with plants at work: the largest ones drop leaves at a slow but steady rate regardless of what else is going on, but the smaller ones pretty much only drop leaves when they're moved from a light spot to a dark one.

So that solves that problem. Pretty much. It's not like they won't drop leaves for other reasons, and if you have one that you've had for a long time, and you swear the light level hasn't changed, then there are other things to look for, but if you're seeing leaf drop on a plant that is established and undisturbed, then the things to check are the sorts of things you'd check for any other plant, and consequently not really newsworthy.⁴

Ficus benjamina lineup. (L-R) 'Too Little,' 'Spearmint,' 'Monique,' 'Midnight'
Ficus benjamina, as you may be figuring out from the above picture, comes in a lot of different cultivars⁵, and we have at least four of these at work, with one more ('Exotica'⁶) coming at the end of the month.

'Too Little'
'Too Little' is mainly used as a bonsai specimen, as far as I can tell: I can't say I've ever seen it grown into a floor-sized tree, though I suppose that doesn't mean it never happens. I'm not a big fan, personally: they're messy, and although the desired effect is a bushy plant, they don't actually grow that way: one has to trim back the leaders as they form, which means that they don't maintain a rounded, outdoor-tree form for very long. That said, I may be being unfair. It's entirely possible that they're awesome if they're well-treated. Most of our bonsai is in pretty lousy shape at any given time, primarily because neither WCW or I like bonsai particularly well, or know anything much about it, and so the whole bonsai collection kind of lurches from crisis to crisis.

'Spearmint'
'Spearmint' I like. We have a very large, floor-sized plant that is pretty well-behaved, and I've managed to get some cuttings from it to take (though not very many: maybe 10-25%), plus it's pretty. The 'Spearmints' were the worst about dropping leaves when they arrived off the truck, but 1) there were more of them to begin with, so my perceptions may be skewed, and 2) they were still not very bad about it, considering that they'd been in boxes on a truck for about a week.

'Monique'
'Monique' is, according to its tag, bred to be more resistant to leaf drop than most other varieties, and also has a more weeping habit. The leaves have wavy edges on them as well, which is nice if you like that sort of thing, I guess. Allegedly, the leaves get more ruffly in lower light (probably because Ficus tend to get larger, thinner leaves when grown in low light, and more leaf area means more opportunity to ruffle, though I'm told that in very bright light, plants will grow cupped leaves to shade themselves, which is kind of remarkable if you think about it). I haven't seen one all grown up yet, to my knowledge, so I don't know if the "weeping habit" business is hype or reality. They were pretty good about hanging on to leaves when they arrived.

'Midnight.' There is a 50-50 chance that this is the same exact plant pictured above, because I bought mine after I took this picture, and we only had two come in on the truck.
The main draw here is, as the name implies, the darker leaves, but it's really not that the leaves are dark as that they start out normally-colored and then become dark, so the effect on a large plant is of a big dark mass with brighter specks at each of the growing tips. Big specimens can be quite pretty, and unlike the variegated cultivars like 'Spearmint,' they're actually prettier from further away than they are close-up, which is rare. This cultivar is also supposed to be relatively resistant to leaf drop, and maybe it is, but I wasn't exceptionally impressed with mine on that count, once I got it home. Granted that it had had a kind of rough time, getting shipped up from Florida, with all the acclimation that that involves, and then going from the work greenhouse to my apartment, which means another round of acclimation, but the Ficus maclellandii I bought last winter lost way fewer leaves.

Maybe that's not a fair comparison. I don't know. I will say that after six weeks, 'Midnight' seems to have stopped dropping leaves and is putting on new growth. It seems like it's going to be okay here. 'Midnight' also seems to grow more readily from cuttings than most of the other Ficus types I've tried so far, though that could be more a matter of me getting better at doing it, not anything the plant is contributing, and the cuttings in question are hardly done yet, so that could change.

There are other varieties out there, but those are what I could get pictures of, and they're pretty much representative of the variation out there. Care for any of them is pretty close to the default plant: bright indirect light (though this is flexible: they can survive in a range from moderate light up to full sun), high humidity is nice but average or even dry indoor levels are acceptable, room temperatures (or warmer), water when about half-dry, or a little before. (Overwatering seems to be worse than underwatering, though they can adapt to a range of conditions, given enough time. Don't let them stand in water, whatever watering schedule you end up with: that never goes well.) They are supposed to be especially pleased if you can give them a summer outside, though of course this means that in the fall when you bring them back in, they're going to drop a bunch of leaves over the light-levels thing, so don't say you weren't warned.⁷

They're not especially prone to any particular bugs; we have trouble with spider mites at work, but we lean to having problems with spider mites on everything at work, because until recently, we had a gigantic F. benjamina that shaded an area maybe 20 feet in diameter, that had mites, which would fall off and get on everything else. The plant was far too big for effective pest management, and it was also tall enough to be interfering with air circulation and the shade cloths, and it was basically unsellable because it was planted into the ground under the greenhouse, so it was kind of a problem. To deal with the first few problems, I cut it back (as I was told to), and then somebody didn't like the way I did it, so it got cut back more, and then a third person thought that was kind of lopsided, and cut it a bit further, and then finally the boss said, you know what, we can't sell it anyway, so just cut it back to about eight feet tall and if it wants to come back from that, let it, and if not, we can get rid of it and stick something else there? And so it was:


The spider mite situation in that area has improved since, though the sudden increase in light was a problem for a few plants. The tree has elected to come back, though as you can see from the below picture, the new growth is laughably out of proportion so far:


It's not the easiest plant in the world, though like Ally Sheedy ("Allison"), it's not particularly difficult, either. It just doesn't want to be ignored. Why would you want to ignore it anyway?

(More photos of more cultivars, including the intriguingly-named 'Exotica,' can be found at the follow-up post here.)

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Photo credits:
Ally Sheedy: from leavemethewhite.com
Ficus pictures: me

Other credits:

Special thanks to Al / tapla for reading an early draft of this and suggesting corrections. For the record: the "The Great Tapla, tAKaASDoW" joke was in the version I sent to him, and not something he himself suggested.

¹ (deciduous = drops all its leaves in winter) Ficus benjamina is from India and Southeast Asia, a region with distinct wet and dry seasons. The plant may, therefore, drop leaves if it believes that the dry season is imminent, as for example if it gets, you know, very dry.
² (He prefers "Al." I just call him TGTtAKaASDoW in my head 'cause it sounds cooler.)
³ (Other decline-in-conditions possibilities: lowering of temperatures, being over- or underwatered.)
⁴ I'd check for overwatering, pests (especially spider mites), underwatering, and temperature changes, in that order. There could be other reasons, like root rot, but it's more work to pull the plant out to look at the roots, so start with the stuff you can check easily, and work up to the rest.
⁵ A contraction of "cultivated varieties." Ficus benjamina cv. 'Midnight' is to Ficus benjamina as Holstein is to cattle, or basset hound is to dog. At least to a first approximation.
⁶ I haven't seen anything that explains what's so great about 'Exotica,' relative to the others: the info we got from the wholesaler just says small leaves and "open" habit, which could mean a lot of things. The pictures I've run across look pretty ho-hum. I'll let you know.
⁷ It's still probably better for the plant in the long run, and it will definitely grow faster and better. It's just that it's also going to crash once a year. Moving the plant into shade first, when nighttime temperatures start dropping below 50ºF (10ºC), will ease the transition and make for a softer landing. Pick whatever approach seems most appropriate to your level of emotional stability.