Assorted Guzmanias at Pierson's, in Cedar Rapids."What they don't want you to know about the plants" is a verbatim Google search that brought some anonymous (and, presumably, disappointed) person to PATSP many months ago. The idea tickled me, and I've wanted to write a post on the subject ever since, but it was obviously a problematic topic while I was working -- it's not a good idea to blog about what "they" don't want "you" to know about the plants when "you" are the "they."
Now, though, "they" are "they" and "you" is "me" and "scare quotes" are "scare quotes" and the post seems much more writable. It
feels a little weird: though most of this is stuff I've talked about on PATSP at one time or another, this is the first time I've collected it all together. When I was actually in the business of selling plants, these weren't things I necessarily shielded all customers from knowing about -- if it was relevant to the situation, I'd generally let you know -- but I also didn't rush up and give everyone unsolicited lists of reasons to take their business elsewhere, either. And most of these things would apply anywhere a customer could go anyway, so telling people about it wouldn't have benefited anybody.
1. The soil is probably crap.This was really not our fault at all, and it's not likely to be different anywhere else, but it's true: most of the time, the potting mix the plants were in was what they'd been shipped to us in, i.e., mostly peat moss, which is unsuitable for most indoor plants: peat holds water too long, and then becomes water-repellent when it dries, making it too wet when it's wet and too dry when it's dry. It also tends to lead to fungus gnats. I assume the growers use it mainly because it's cheap, but I'm not sure: in the warmer climates where tropical houseplants are produced, it may be that you actually
need something that will hold a little water on the plant, lest you be forever watering.
A fungus gnat, as close-up as any of my cameras have yet been able to manage. I think it's kinda cute, though admittedly they're cuter when you can't see quite as much detail.Anyway. Bad soil is not a particularly good reason not to buy a plant. One, it's fixed easily enough by repotting, which you may need to do regardless. Two, everybody's plants come from the same places and are potted in the same mix.
2. We sprayed pesticides in here less than a week ago.Where I worked, we sprayed pesticides every week, usually on Saturday night after the store closed.
1 The specific pesticides in question changed from week to week, but the spraying itself was a constant.
We used what was basically a very large fogger, so nobody needed to be present when the actual spraying was happening, but I still had to measure and mix the pesticides
du jour before leaving for the day, and although all the relevant safety precautions were taken, and I had the very best protective equipment that an extremely small amount of money could buy, I still figured this was probably not doing me any good, especially doing it weekly, and then being around the residue afterwards.
2This might be a legitimate reason not to buy a plant, if you know you're sensitive to certain kinds of chemicals, though most people don't handle, lick, or consume their plants enough to where I can see it making any kind of difference, and even if you
do, plants
can also absorb dangerous chemicals from indoor air. I'm
on record as believing that the air-purifying qualities of houseplants have been criminally oversold and probably don't matter in most home situations,
3 but a very tiny absorption of toxic chemicals from the air would more or less balance out any very tiny release of pesticides that happen to be on the plant when you buy it. Also, even the most chemically-fertilized, pesticide-drenched houseplant will
become an organically-grown plant if you grow it organically, so in the long run, you're probably ahead, chemical-exposure-wise, to buy the plant anyway.
Big box stores like Lowe's and Home Depot do not, as far as I'm aware, spray their plants while they're in the store, though they'd generally have been sprayed before they were shipped, so you can't expect to avoid pesticide exposure by shopping in those sorts of places.
Organically-grown houseplants do exist, but I'm only aware of one location in Iowa that ever sold them. It's in Ames, I've only been there once, it was three years ago, I don't know the people who ran it, I don't know if it still exists,
4 and I was a little uneasy about buying stuff when I was there because I saw bugs in the sales area. So the idea might still need some work. However, organic produce is mainstream(ish) now, and people have been generally anti-pesticide for a long time, so one might see organic houseplants in stores in the future. The first person who figures out how to grow houseplants organically, for prices comparable to conventionally-grown houseplants, and is able to advertise the fact effectively, stands to make a lot of money. I don't know whether anybody's trying yet.
3. It may be cheaper somewhere else.There are many good reasons to buy your houseplants from a locally-owned garden center, as opposed to a large chain store like Wal-Mart or Lowe's, but price is not one of those reasons. From what I've seen, the prices on small, non-succulent plants (in 3- or 4-inch pots
5) tend to be approximately the same anywhere you look, but cacti and succulents, or large tropicals, get considerably more expensive at independent garden centers. Seasonal blooming plants like
Cyclamen or
poinsettias also tend to be cheapest at box stores, and even grocery stores, though you take more of a gamble on the quality of the plant itself and the advice you receive about its care. Florists are potentially better on the advice, but also the most expensive places to buy plants, from everything I've seen.
Bromeliad-and-Dracaena display from the ex-job.I wish this weren't the case. I wish that local places could offer the sorts of prices that the big chains can. I also wish I had a magical, talking unicorn that granted wishes and pooped gold coins.
6I don't patronize local places exclusively, though when I checked it out with the spreadsheets, I was a lot closer to doing so than I would have guessed.
7 It wasn't a deliberate, principled decision to keep my money local. That's just where the selection is broader and weirder, so that's where I've tended to look. Lowe's has better prices, but they also have the same twenty plants over and over and over again.
4. Some of the plants are not good long-term prospects.I've covered this already in
a separate post, pretty much, but it turns out to be true of outdoor plants as well:
this post at Bloomingwriter talks about plants being sold in garden centers despite not being hardy for the zone, or despite being extremely invasive, or otherwise inappropriate for your situation. Doing a little research before you shop will help, but people who aren't into houseplants (or plants in general) don't necessarily know that they have different requirements and will buy whatever first gets their attention. And I think
all beginners get cacti wrong the first few times.
8The industry could provide better information on this point than it actually does, but they don't have a lot of incentive. The most demanding plants are also often the prettiest, with a few exceptions, and people impulse-buy pretty things a lot more than they impulse-buy plain things. It doesn't pay to put obstacles in the way of these impulse purchases by, for example, telling customers something about the plants. So if there's anything at all, it's probably just a name and "easy-care." I've seen so many plants called "easy" and "low light" that were definitely not, that I consider claims like this to have no meaning whatsoever. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose; easy-care/low-light's just another word for for-sale.
Alocasia amazonica 'Polly,' which I've seen called easy-care but not, yet, low-light.It's unfortunate but true that retailers run the risk of making no sales at all, if they try to steer customers away from potentially bad experiences. Not every customer is willing to listen to the how-to-grow, once you've said a plant is difficult. I know I had more than one customer who put down bad choices readily enough, but then never picked up a better one: sometimes it might have been better for the business (if not the plant or the customer) if I'd just told people what they obviously wanted to hear.
Because of this, any plant seller immediately jumps up several notches in my estimation if they'll admit that a plant is difficult, and immediately becomes a favorite place to shop if they can tell me
in what way it's difficult and how to grow them successfully. This is vanishingly rare anywhere, but it's more common at independent, local garden centers.
5. Some of the plants are barely rooted.This took me a while to clue into, but one day a customer wanted to buy a
Yucca guatemalensis, and have us repot it, and when I took it out of the grower pot to put it in the new pot, I discovered that it barely had any roots at all. This is mainly only a problem with plants grown by sticking a section of mature cane into a pot until it starts to sprout new foliage, something that gets done a lot with
Yucca guatemalensis,
Dracaena fragrans (there's a
reason why they're so often
damsels in distress), and
Polyscias species. My recommendation would be, don't buy sprouted-cane sorts of plants unless you can see some roots coming out of the drainage holes, or sticking a finger down into the soil hits some roots. Tugging the plants to see if they shift or pull out is also a method, but obviously the retailer's not going to be happy with you if you pull all the
Dracaenas out of their pots.
Barely-sprouted cane sections of Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana,' as they are usually sold.Where I used to work, we propagated some of our own plants, and it did occasionally happen that plants would take off growing new leaves before they'd really gotten a decent root system, and they got put out for sale and then people brought them back, angry, because they weren't particularly rooted yet. I mean, they would have gotten there eventually if the customer hadn't, you know, tried to
fiddle with them. But that was my fault; I don't think it's a common occurrence. (It wasn't even a common occurrence with us. Maybe it happened twice.)
6. Some of the plants have bugs. I am convinced that if you start out with one plant, and add one at a time to any given location, be it a personal collection or a sales floor or whatever, once you reach some critical number of plants, you are guaranteed to always have some kind of bug problem happening at any given moment. I'm not sure what the critical number is: personal experience tells me it's higher than 15 and lower than 850. I realize that doesn't really narrow anything down.
Now, you'd think that being sprayed with pesticides weekly would fix this problem, and make the bugs go away, this being what pesticides are supposed to do. They don't. Bugs come in from the suppliers, they wander in from outside, they find places to hide from the pesticide and then re-emerge when the spraying is over, they evolve resistance to the sprays. There will be bugs. Somewhere. Lurking. Knowing what they look like, and checking a plant carefully before you buy, is important.
This isn't really fair to beginners, who won't know what the common plant pests look like. In a perfect world, you could rely on the employees and the cashiers to tell you if you've chosen a plant that has bugs,
9 but A) sadly, many of them don't know what bugs look like either, B) even if they did know, bugs are small, and they hide, and can be missed, and C) even if they did know, and did see them, they wouldn't necessarily tell you about it, unless it was to upsell you on a bug spray of some kind. (I honestly only recall
one particular time when I saw a possible pest problem and didn't say something to the customer, and that was a very special case where the customer was being an extreme asshole and needed to be punished.)
Still. Forewarned is forearmed. At the very least you should learn what the more common insect pests look like, so you can reject plants for yourself instead of having to rely on strangers being such great people that they'll act counter to their self-interest. In brief:
Aphids: sometimes they'll be big enough to see actual bodies, but I've also seen them looking like a sprinkling of sand or dust on the surface of a leaf. They can be green, yellow, whitish, black, red, and probably other colors I've forgotten.
Aphids on a Brugmansia. You may have to open the picture in a new window to see them.Mealybugs: resemble gray-white fungus or cotton on the plant, especially under leaves and where leaves join stems (the
axils). They're tricky because some plants naturally have fluffy white cottony bits on them, so it can be difficult to tell if you've got a mealybug or if that's just how the plant is. When in doubt, don't buy. Watch for mealybugs everywhere, but especially on cacti and succulents.
Scale: scale are really hard to identify, especially when they're on woody stems, because they look like the natural bumps of the stem. If they're on the underside of a leaf, or on an otherwise-smooth surface like a
Cereus peruvianus stem, they're easier to detect. Scale will come off if scratched with a fingernail; natural bumps and pits won't.
Spider mites: spider mites give leaves a dusty or slightly bronzed appearance that doesn't clean up when wiped with a finger. They also spin webs under leaves and around leaf axils, which are easily seen since the mites themselves often live and poop in the webs. They favor
Hedera helix,
Codiaeum variegatum,
Musa spp. (banana),
Calatheas, and
Schefflera species, among others. (More comprehensive list
here.)
Fungus gnats: tiny, blackish, slow-moving flies that fly around when you bump the plant. They're most common in peaty, overwatered soil, whatever the plant is. I don't personally consider fungus gnats a big enough problem to reject a plant, since they're not that harmful, really, but your tolerance may vary.
Whiteflies: also tiny, but in this case white. Sometimes when they fly around, they look a little bit like cigarette ash floating around in the air: they have that same erratic movement. You'll notice them if you bump a heavily-infested plant, but smaller infestations are easier to miss. Check the underside of leaves, especially on thin-leaved tropicals. They're especially fond of
Hibiscus,
Abutilon, poinsettias, and basil.
Whitefly on Hibiscus rosa-sinensis. It's not usually quite so obvious.And remember: at least one of these bugs is somewhere in the store with you. You can just about count on it. So be vigilant.
I don't mean, with this post, to make it sound like buying a houseplant should be a particularly intense emotional experience for you. Most plant purchases work out just fine so long as you have #4 and #6 covered: know what you're buying, and check it for bugs. But the other things are still occasionally relevant, and in any case, this is the best answer I can give for "what they don't want you to know about the plants." So, my mysterious Googler, I hope you see this someday. Sorry it's so late.
-
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
Posts
