Appearance

Plants

Rare aroids, mostly. One well-photographed specimen of each species, with what the references say about it and what I have actually found growing it.

The aroid pages here start from one shared set of rules — light, water, humidity, substrate, pests — collected on the general plant care page, which states at the top who it is written for. Nothing else here links to it.

Genera

Monstera

Araceae

Climbing aroids that fenestrate as they mature. Most of what is sold as a houseplant wants more light and a chunkier mix than it usually gets.

4 species

Philodendron

Araceae

A very large genus — over six hundred species, nearly all of them climbers or epiphytes; the self-heading tree types the trade sells are a small group of about twenty. More forgiving of lower light than Monstera or Alocasia, which is most of why they became houseplants.

1 species

Alocasia

Araceae

Grown on a thick underground stem — a rhizome, though the hobby calls its offsets corms — and one of only two genera here that go properly dormant rather than merely slowing down; the Indian kale is the other. Most of the reputation for being difficult comes from underwaterings or people treating a resting plant as a dead one.

4 species

Hoya

Apocynaceae

Epiphytic climbers with thick waxy leaves and umbels of small, intensely scented, almost artificial-looking flowers. Pollen travels in paired sacs — pollinia, as in orchids — and in at least one species those sacs attach to the legs of night-flying moths. The family is Apocynaceae; sources still printing Asclepiadaceae are decades out of date.

1 species

Paphiopedilum

Orchidaceae

Slipper orchids: a low rosette of strap-shaped leaves and usually one flower to a stem, with a deep pouch, a broad dorsal sepal held over it and two petals spreading sideways. The leaves sort the genus in two for culture — mottled ones are warm growers, plain green ones are mostly cool, with the strap-leaved multiflorals a warm exception — and getting that fork wrong is the usual way one is lost. The whole genus has been on CITES Appendix I since 1990, which is why a supermarket plant has paperwork behind it.

1 species

Collection

Everything I currently grow — 49 plants. The ones with a page written for them link to it.

Alocasia , 7 plants

Anthurium , 4 plants

Begonia , 2 plants

Carnivorous , 3 plants

Ferns , 3 plants

Ficus , 3 plants

Maranta , 2 plants

Monstera , 4 plants

Orchids , 2 plants

Other , 4 plants

Other aroids , 2 plants

Philodendron , 7 plants

Succulents , 4 plants

  • Graptoveria hybrid × Graptoveria
  • Jade plant Crassula ovata (Mill.) Druce
  • Petite Bicolor Crassula 'Petite Bicolor'
  • Snake plant Dracaena trifasciata (Prain) Mabb. 'Laurentii'

Trees , 2 plants