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Post by tillystar on Apr 4, 2009 3:15:13 GMT
We don't have a garden and I have terrible garden envy looking at all your pictures. Anyway, with no garden I thought I'd share our house plants with you. All the plants by this window have been rescued from the communal bins in our flats, neither of us really have the first clue about plants but always feel sorry for them being thrown out and have to bring them in. Anyone else have houseplants to share?  |
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 4, 2009 3:29:25 GMT
Tilly, that is beautiful! I love the way you have the chair turned towards the leafy bower and window.
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Post by spindrift on Apr 4, 2009 7:16:33 GMT
A very nice display, Tilly. I am truly hopeless with house plants. They all die on me. I've long since given up keeping them.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2009 10:26:26 GMT
I too have rescued many,many plants from the trash and resurrected them. It's very gratifying.
I remember when I went off to college in the city(Boston),I missed the green of a garden terribly. I got some house plants for my dormitory room and it made all the difference in the world psychologically and transformed an otherwise boring living space to a mini paradise.
Is there any kind of community garden where you live Tilly where you could grow some flowers,herbs,vegetables.? I helped start one here and it's been very successful.
Windowboxes too can be very satisfying. There are more and more of them in NYC,some spectacular.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2009 10:32:12 GMT
I manage to keep a few things alive, but many more have died. That's mostly because most of my 'garden' is in the attic room, under the roof window -- it is the darkest room! I might dig up a few photos sooner or later.
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Post by tillystar on Apr 14, 2009 13:11:23 GMT
Casi, there are some allotments around but there are waiting lists of years for them, hopefully we will have a garden by then as we are planning to move in a couple of years.
We are very lucky here, the flats I live in have 8 acres of gardens that are looked after by a team of gardeners who look after it beautifully. It makes me very spoilt for the day I have to look after my own garden. Although I like the idea of pottering about I don't know much about it all and the thought scares me, but would be so happy to have the tomato plants which what I dream of!
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Post by lagatta on Apr 14, 2009 15:44:38 GMT
How pretty, tillystar! And congratulations for taking in those abandoned plants and nursing them back to health.
My plants are quite healthy now (knock wood of one of the trees) because I live in an upper flat of a typical Montréal triplex (wrought iron outdoor staircase and balconies). It is too early still to start setting out flowers and boxes of herbs and tomatoes on the balcony. Casimira, are you originally from NOLA? If so, you must have found the long months in Boston without greenery hard to take. I find them depressing here, though I am from this climate. That is why the plants, including a ficus tree and a palm tree, are so important. Renzo (cat) likes them too, he loves to curl up among the plants.
Here too, there are very long waiting lists for allotments.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 14, 2009 17:03:38 GMT
No lagatta,I grew up on the Atlantic East Coast so, familiar with the long cold winters but my grandparents and parents both had conservatories and greenhouse plants,lush ferns,orchids. Thinking back on it not many people "back then" did have houseplants let alone a conservatory with exotics. My favorite Aunt Mary was known to travel with a little penknife she used to snitch cuttings with. Her pockets always had seeds and leaves in them,she was quite eccentric in that regard. I have inherited some of her traits.
Tilly,jasmines and such can be grown indoors quite successfully with the right light. They aren't fussy at all. I know of several other semitropicals that will also do indoors.Passionflowers,citrus...
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Post by Jazz on Apr 14, 2009 21:54:52 GMT
Your window is lovely Tilly, as is the oasis you have created with the chair and the small beautiful mirror with the leafy reflection. I have a few plants in my kitchen, the only room with decent light. The sunporch is flooded with light, but very cold in the winter. Most of my energy goes into the garden.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2009 5:46:01 GMT
I really hate what has happened to houseplants in Europe. Just like the flowers, 90% of them are grown in the Netherlands, in giant hangars where they get something like 18 hours of (artificial) light a day. Since there is no way that they can get this much light in anyone's home, they are programmed to slowly die in 2 to 6 months. They are not meant to live -- they are meant to be replaced regularly.
There are very very few of them that you can keep alive, and they will never look as flourishing and green as when you bought them.
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Post by bazfaz on Apr 16, 2009 7:25:08 GMT
We have a number of spider plants in pots - these seem to tolerate the lack of light indoors.
A bit like Tilly, we rescue plants that have been thrown away. At All Saints Day here the cemeteries are filled with pots of chrysanthemums. After a couple of weeks people start chucking them in the cemetery bin. Mrs Faz rescues the better looking ones and plants them in our garden. So we have a nice display the next autumn. Also somebody threw out a rose that was dying for lack of water. We have repotted it into something bigger and nursed it back to life. It is on our terrace now and has promising buds on it.
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Post by spindrift on Apr 16, 2009 8:22:45 GMT
Baz - you have to be very dedicated to rescue such plants. I'm impressed.
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Post by happytraveller on Apr 16, 2009 11:10:39 GMT
We have a nice banana tree in our house. It got way too big last year and a friend suggested to cut the stem at about 20cm. I was amazed to see that within only a couple of hours the tree grew a new leaf, coming from the middle of the stem. It is now nearly as big as it used to be and I know I can just cut it again if it gets too big. It will live outside in the summer months.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2009 12:12:03 GMT
Yes,HT,bananas,you can watch them grow. I macheted a grove of them yesterday. They are quite heavy as they are about 80% water. I try to arrange with client to let them lay about a day or so before removing to allow the water to leach out. Saves my back alot of work.
Do you know which type banana HT? Some are just ornamental with fairly insignificant fruit. Still nice though,that touch of exotica. That's what's so cool about houseplants. Just one palm or fern can transform a whole room.
K2, I had heard that about European plants. That sucks. I avoid buying from some of the big box stores e.g. Walmart,Home Depot plants that I'm fairly certain are grown under conditions that removed from will stress out a plant to near death. But,with some care can revive. Not as radical as there I suppose.
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Post by happytraveller on Apr 16, 2009 13:16:41 GMT
I have no idea what type banana it is casimira. We "adopted" the plant from someone who moved to a smaller place and didn't have room for it. It's over 20 years old.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2009 13:34:06 GMT
Wow,an old friend by now!
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Post by bazfaz on Apr 16, 2009 14:11:53 GMT
We planted a banana in the garden, an essential in what I call our Tropical Folly (along with cannas, hibiscus, gginger lilies, palms, eucomis, daturas, agapanthus etc). It is Musa basjoo. The rootstock seems perfectly hardy. The frost kills off the leaves but they shoot again from the stem/trunk. The stems die after flowering but at present we have about 8 stems just recovering from this winter's frost and snow.
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Post by Kimby on Apr 16, 2009 18:04:44 GMT
My husband has a green thumb and is the keeper of our house plants, which at one time numbered over 70. He took a course in houseplants while in college in the 70's during which he started a jade plant from a cutting. 30 years later, it's still thriving and the size of a small shrub. When we visited Michigan State University a few years back on a nostalgia tour for him, he showed me the campus greenhouse and there was a giant jade plant. Perhaps the very one he'd taken his cuttings from!
He also has a hoya from a cutting from his mother's hoya which was started as a cutting from HER mother's hoya. It blooms with fuzzy white flowers with red centers that smell heavenly at nighttime...
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2009 20:45:34 GMT
Hmmm,I thought hoya flowers were waxy. Have not seen one with fuzzy.
They do have a lovely fragrance.
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Post by Kimby on Apr 16, 2009 21:21:46 GMT
They are both waxy and fuzzy, if that's possible. Usually with a big teardrop of sap hanging off the red center. The leaves are definitely waxy, and quite thick.
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Post by spindrift on Apr 16, 2009 21:26:40 GMT
They are very pretty  |
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Post by Kimby on Apr 16, 2009 22:22:32 GMT
Our hoya's flowers are more white-petalled (or fainter pink).
You can see the teardrops on spindrift's photo.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2009 22:58:39 GMT
The one I have is hoya carnosa I believe.Waxy leaves and curious upside down whitish to blush blooms similar to photo,paler. It's rather ordinary looking until it blooms(like many plants actually).I think there's only about fifteen or so species of hoya.
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 17, 2009 2:31:46 GMT
I was keeping this information to myself, but now the cat is out of the bag ............... In the parts of the US where I've lived, usually the only hoya available is hoya carnosa. Also, it seems like it's one of those plants that someone gives you -- that you never have to buy for yourself. Whatever, a couple of years ago I found in a houseplant book that there are all kinds of lovely hoyas I'd never seen. I was eaten alive with desire for them, especially since I can't even find hoya carnosa here. If you put hoya in google images, thus, and look at the first three pages, you too can develop terrible hoya yearnings. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 17, 2009 2:52:33 GMT
The way you put things Bixa,"terrible hoya yearnings". So forbidding!
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Post by spindrift on Apr 17, 2009 7:35:12 GMT
I don't think they'd grow in England.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 17, 2009 12:22:06 GMT
Sure they would spindrift,under conservatory conditions or really just barely. They are not real demanding.
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welle
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om sweet om
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Post by welle on Apr 24, 2009 0:23:57 GMT
For Jade plants, all you need is a single leaf and some patience to make a whole new plant.
I'm amazed at the fast speed of growth for banana trees. My uncle near Basel has a few of them, they grow like crazy. Maybe it's the Swiss air.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 11, 2011 12:57:05 GMT
Didn't want to start a new thread just to whine about when all of my indoor plants decide to die, or at least get very very sick, at this time of year. My problem is that the only place I really have room for plants is in the darkest room in my flat with just a small ceiling window. I can keep things alive until winter -- and then they die.
So I have decided that I need to buy a horticultural lamp once and for all and forget about natural light. Does anybody have experience with this sort of thing?
I just made a preliminary web search and did not really understand what my needs might be.
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Post by mickthecactus on Jan 11, 2011 13:05:51 GMT
Regret no - but I should.
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