Slow plants, kept well, in a rainy city
Portland hands you nine gray months and three bright ones, and nearly every houseplant question that reaches our counter turns out to be a question about that. What you’ll find in this journal is whatever has actually worked on our own benches — not what the little tag in the pot claims.
On the bench this month
We repot in earnest from late February on, so the front room right now is a cheerful mess of nursery pots, sifted bark and a lot of spilled pumice. Three of the plants below are out on the bench because you keep asking us the same question about them. The fourth is there because it nearly died on us, and you’ll get more out of hearing how that happened than out of another tidy success story.
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Golden pothos
Profile · forgiving
Start here if nothing you have owned has lasted yet. It will trail four feet down a bookcase in a room you had written off as too dark, and it tells you plainly when it is thirsty.
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Monstera deliciosa
Profile · wants a pole
Nine questions in ten are about leaves that come out whole. It is almost never fertilizer and almost always light, plus something to climb. The profile walks you through it, with a test you can run in your own room.
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Snake plant
Profile · drought lover
The one that dies of kindness. Through a Portland winter you will water ours about every nine or ten weeks, and they look better for it. Your choice of pot matters more here than your choice of plant.
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Maidenhair fern
Profile · the hard one
We lost most of a tray of these in a dry spell two summers ago, and it taught us something about humidity we had been repeating without quite believing. You get the failure along with the fix.
The two guides you’ll want first
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How to water a houseplant properly
Guide · revised August 2025
How much, how often, the finger test, and why three moisture meters from the hardware store gave us three different answers in one pot. You also get a seasonal table for an unheated Portland room.
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Reading the light in your own rooms
Guide · revised January 2024
“Bright indirect” means nothing until you measure it. Here is the shadow test we teach at the counter, what a north window in this city is really worth, and the point where you’ll want to add a lamp.
A note from the counter
People apologize to us all day long. Someone comes in with a browning calathea in a paper sack and opens with “I know I’ve ruined it.” You almost certainly have not. A plant that has dropped four leaves and held nine is a plant settling into a room, and what helps you now is not guilt but a note of what changed the week before.
If you keep one habit from this whole site, keep that one: write down the date you watered and the date anything went wrong. Six weeks of your own notes will beat any advice handed to you across a counter, ours included.
— Nell Ostrowski, who owns the shop and writes most of this
We went through this page on February 3, 2025.