Eight plants we actually keep

Start here if nothing you have owned has lasted yet. Not because pothos is unkillable — we have drowned a few — but because it fails slowly and where you can see it. A thirsty pothos goes limp all over in an afternoon and comes back within two hours of a proper soak, which is about as clear a message as a houseplant will ever send you.

Water, winter

Every 12–16 days, in a 6″ pot

Water, summer

Every 6–8 days

Light

Anything from a north window to six feet back from a south one

Soil

Our standard mix (see the recipe)

Difficulty

Forgiving

On our bench since

2016 — the original cutting is still here

What goes wrong

One yellow leaf at a time down near the pot, with the rest of the plant firm: that is age, and it is fine. Yellow leaves in threes and fours, soft at the stem, with soil still damp from last week: that is root rot starting, and what you’ll want is a smaller pot, not a drier schedule. Pothos roots like to be crowded, and a plant potted up two sizes at once will sit in wet soil for a month and sulk at you.

Crisp brown tips with everything else healthy are usually just our tap water. We have never found it worth filtering, though if your building has softened water, try a jug of rainwater for a season and see whether the tips stop.

Propagating

Cut below a node — the small brown nub on the vine — and stand three cuttings in one jar of water on a windowsill that gets morning light. You’ll have roots in ten to twenty days. Pot them up together once the roots are about as long as your little finger, and do not wait longer than that: the long water roots you get after two months are brittle, and half of them snap while you are potting.

Nine monstera questions in ten are the same question: why are the new leaves coming out whole? You’ll expect the answer to be fertilizer. It is almost never fertilizer. It is light, and after light it is whether the plant has anything to climb.

In the wild a monstera starts on the forest floor and gets more light — and bigger, more perforated leaves — the higher it climbs. Indoors it reads a moss pole or a cedar plank the same way. Ours put out whole leaves for two full years in a corner, then split every new leaf after the third, once we moved it three feet and gave it something to grip.

Water, winter

Every 14–18 days, 10″ pot

Water, summer

Every 7–9 days

Light

Within three feet of an east or south window if you want splits

Support

Moss pole or cedar plank; tie loosely with soft twine

Soil

Standard mix plus an extra two handfuls of bark

Difficulty

Easy to keep, harder to keep handsome

Aerial roots

Don’t cut them off just because they look untidy. Guide the thick ones into the pole and mist it when you water; that is how the plant anchors itself and how the top leaves get supplied. If one is heading across the floor and you truly cannot live with it, tuck it back into the pot instead of trimming it.

The plant that dies of kindness. Every dead snake plant handed across our counter — dozens of them by now — has been soft and brown at the base, never dry. The leaves store water for you; the roots are thin and will rot in two weeks of wet soil.

Through a Portland winter ours go nine or ten weeks between waterings and look better for it. That number startles people, so we will say it twice. Nine weeks. In a cold room the plant is barely growing and using almost nothing.

Water, winter

Every 8–10 weeks — yes, really

Water, summer

Every 3–4 weeks

Light

Tolerates dim; grows in bright

Pot

Terracotta, snug, with a hole — this matters more than the plant

Soil

Half standard mix, half coarse pumice

Difficulty

Easy if you can leave it alone

Rescuing one

If the base has gone mushy, tip the whole thing out and look. Firm white roots anywhere mean it is worth saving: cut every soft leaf off at soil level, let the rest sit bare on newspaper for two days, repot into a dry pumice-heavy mix, and then do not water it for three weeks. We save maybe half. The half we lose had been wet for months before they got to us.

The hard one, and the one we are least sure of. In the dry spell of July 2023 we lost eleven out of a tray of fourteen in four days. They were in the front room, watered on schedule, in a window we would have called gentle. What killed them was the air: the shop door was propped open for the heat, and humidity in that room sat under thirty percent for most of a week.

We had been telling people “they like humidity” for years without really believing it mattered more than watering did. It does. A maidenhair will forgive you a missed watering by going crisp on the outer fronds and pushing new ones from the crown. It will not forgive dry air, because the whole plant is thin enough to lose water faster than the roots can replace it.

Water, winter

Every 4–6 days; never let it dry through

Water, summer

Every 2–3 days, sometimes daily

Humidity

50% and up; this is the whole plant

Light

North window, or a shaded east one

Soil

Standard mix plus a third more coir; it must stay damp

Difficulty

Genuinely hard

The haircut

A maidenhair that has gone completely brown usually is not dead. Cut every frond off an inch above the soil, keep the soil damp and warm, and then wait. Ours took five weeks to show anything at all. Two of the three survivors from that July were cut back to nothing in August and were full again by Christmas.

The office plant, and we mean that kindly. Underground it carries potato-like rhizomes full of water, which is how it survives a month in a room nobody walked into. The trade-off is that it hides trouble from you: a ZZ that has been overwatered since November looks perfectly well right up until the day it does not.

Ours sits in the darkest corner of the back room, gets watered whenever one of us remembers, and has put out four new stems since 2021. It is the slowest plant we sell. If you want a shape that changes inside of a year, take a pothos instead.

Water, winter

Every 6–8 weeks

Water, summer

Every 3–4 weeks

Light

Any. Genuinely any, including a windowless hallway with a lamp

Soil

Standard mix with extra pumice

Growth

Two to four new stems a year at best

Difficulty

Forgiving

The yellowing stem

One stem going yellow from the bottom while the others stay glossy is normal shedding. Three at once means water is sitting in the rhizomes. Stop watering completely for six weeks; do not repot it, do not feed it, do not move it. We have never had to do more than that.

A ficus drops leaves when you move it. Every time, no exceptions, and it does not mean you have done a thing wrong. Ours shed six leaves the week we shifted it eighteen inches to make room for a delivery. Put yours where it is going to live, leave it alone there, and give it two months before you judge anything.

The burgundy cultivars want noticeably more light than the plain green ones to hold their color, and that is the disappointment we hear about most. In a north-facing Portland apartment a burgundy rubber plant will go green within a year. Nothing is wrong with your plant when that happens; it is making the most of the light you gave it.

Water, winter

Every 16–20 days, 8″ pot

Water, summer

Every 8–10 days

Light

Bright for burgundy; medium is fine for green

Leaves

Dust them with a soft damp rag every few weeks — dust genuinely costs the plant light

Soil

Standard mix

Difficulty

Easy, but sensitive to being moved

Branching

A rubber plant will happily grow as one bare pole to the ceiling. To get branches out of it, cut the top out in April, just above a leaf scar. It will bleed a white sap — blot that with a rag and keep it off carpet and skin — and it usually pushes two shoots from below the cut within six weeks.

Slow, thick-leaved, and the only plant on this page you would grow mainly for its flowers. Ours took five years to bloom and has bloomed every June since, off the same short bare stalks. Those stalks are the whole secret: cut a spent flower stalk off and you have just cut off next year’s flowers. Leave them, however untidy they look to you.

The other thing that keeps a hoya from flowering is comfort. Ours sits in the brightest, most awkward spot in the shop — a west window that bakes for two hours in July — and gets watered less often than anything but the snake plants.

Water, winter

Every 4–5 weeks

Water, summer

Every 12–16 days

Light

The brightest window you own

Flowers

Year four or five; never cut a spent stalk

Soil

Mostly bark and pumice, a little of the standard mix

Difficulty

Easy to keep alive, patient to flower

We sell these knowing full well that a third of them will come back to us in a paper sack. They are beautiful, and they are demanding in a way that has almost nothing to do with your skill. Crisp brown margins on a calathea mean dry air or mineral-heavy water, and Portland tap water is harder than you would think.

Here is what we have done for two years: rainwater from the barrel behind the shop, or tap water left standing overnight in a wide bowl. It is no cure — the plants still edge brown in February once the heat is on — but the difference across two benches watered two different ways was obvious enough that we stopped arguing about it.

Water, winter

Every 5–7 days; keep just damp

Water, summer

Every 3–4 days

Water quality

Rainwater or stood tap water

Light

North window; direct sun bleaches the pattern

Humidity

50% and up, as with the maidenhair

Difficulty

Hard, and not your fault

The evening fold

Calathea leaves rise and close at night and open again in the morning. If yours stops doing that, something has changed — usually the soil has gone properly dry, and usually a day or two before any leaf shows it. It is the best early warning any plant in this shop will give you, so make a habit of looking at yours in the evening.