Hmmm--I don't know about 'six top'--I think the first would be selecting the right variety. Some plants are just much more co-operative than others. Of course to select the right variety you must take into account the light available, as I'm sure you know, because an easy plant in good light can die in the dark. Had a neighbor once who insisted on growing plants where she thought they looked best in her decorating scheme--generally the darkest corner--and she'd give 'em to me to revive when they obviously were about to die. And I'd tell her they needed more light, and she'd put 'em back in the dark. I have a major problem in my house with wide overhangs so the windows don't get much sun, and with a/c vents in the ceilings that blast dry air on them all summer. The only plants that do really well are on my lightstand with the protection of the top shelf. Gonna try an HID light this winter for larger plants and hope by having the space well filled with plants they'll humidify each other.

1 Adequate light..2 soils..3 proper watering..4 air circulation..5 keeping away from heating or ac vents.. 6 fertilizers

Green, I know a woman like you descibed..she once was going to buy a 'bird' to match her furniture..boy, did I talk her out of that fast.
She shops at expensive nurseries in summer and buys plants like tropical hibiscus (40.00) flowering azalias 20.00..then come fall she tosses them..
She doesn't come over often, (thank God, lol) but when she does she thinks I buy plants in summer then discard in fall like she does..I've explained I do not do this several times, but she can't get it through her head. WE've been over this numerous times.
I once gave her an old braided ficus tree she had her eye on..Since I have so many plants, I gave her the ficus..I was proud of that plant, it'd even berry in fall. I had it growing in a pot inside a wicker basket..around the edge of soil I grew Pink Polka dot plants..It was a nice set up..I then found out she tossed it that fall..I was furious..I had that plant at least 9 yrs and she tosses it!!
Now she has on her eye on an old, 1994 cissus antartica I got when I worked at Rentokil Tropical plants..I offered to make her a cutting, but she wants the whole plant..I'm normally shy but I gave her an outright NO. And she always does the same thing..she'll ask if it's an artificial plant..lol..like I don't know what she's up to. She wants the plant and think she can sweet talk me..NOT.
BTW, she and her dh have money galore..WE do not. WE live check to check or cc. And she's asking ME for free plants..Toni

The lush plants in hotel lobbies and shopping malls do not grow there permanently. The plant maintenance firm rotates them out when they begin to die, and rotates in new gorgeous plants which have been living a life of luxury in a greenhouse or something. (If you regularly visit a mall or office building you can observe the plants vanishing in batches.) This also allows the mall or hotel or whatever to get in seasonal stuff like poinsettias for Xmas.

Brenda

Any idea what happens to the old, dying plants that get rotated out? I might have to ask the local mall what they do with dying plants. If they send them back to a nursery for recovery, oh well, but if they simply throw them out I would love to take a few off their hands to try to nurse back to health.

Alot of the plants you see in offices, stores, restaurants etc are supplied by and then maintained by nurseries that have an indoor landscaping business. They never let the plants get so bad that anyone would notice, and most of the plants are put in the best locations for their type. Usually an "interior landscaper" comes once a week to water, cut back, remove yellow leaves, and assess the plants health. When a plant isn't responding to care, it gets rotated back to the nursery and usually nursed back to health.

As far as how to care for them, its the same as with the smaller plants, only with alot more trips to the sink for water! At some bigger places you use a water tank on wheels. I took a job doing this one summer.

I did interior plant maintenance briefly too. Yes, they are all rotated out and nursed back to health in a greenhouse. The hotel/business does not have access to them. They belong to the plant company.

Not one of my favorite jobs. I hated it because people were always abusing the plants. People would want me to take care of their personal plants and I wasn't allowed to so they'd get mad and dump coffee in the trees that we were being paid to maintain. Then there was the model home that they turned the lights and AC off in, for two weeks, in AZ. The plants fried and I was locked out too.

Very revealing comments. Well, I guess I'm still wondering about the techniques involved, besides astute placement of particular plants in indoor sites that provide a certain level of light, etc. What about soil mixes, drainage (what's in the bottom of the planting pots?), fertilizers? Are the pro's using the "inch-down finger" test for moisture? Or sheerly a watering schedule worked out for each plant species?

Things like that...

Joel

buyorsell, I hear you! One of my stops was at a racetrack where we had huge ficus trees, as big as a house, and all those slimy old race track rats used to throw their cigar butts, gum, and God knows what else, into the plant pots. It was disgusting, and I had to clean it out! I wore rubber gloves for that stop.

(No offense intended to any slimy old race track rats who may be reading this)

(On second thought, actually, ALOT of offense intended, you guys are pigs!!)

And of course, even in classy office buildings there was always some jerk who would dump his coffee or soda into the soil of a plant.

I work for an interior landscaping company. My boss travels to Florida wholesale growers about once a month to personally select the specific plants that he wants. The quality is much better than what you find at the big box stores. I've found very few local retail nurseries that have the same quality and their plants are VERY pricey.

greenbows1 - I found that my HID light was so hot that it actually LOWERED the relative humidity quite a lot and I had to add a humidifier to the grow room to help keep the spider mites at bay. Just a warning for you...

nick - the fate of the old, dying plants depends a lot on the individual company. Some of them have large greenhouse facilities where they can rehab them. Some, like ours, don't. Our greenhouse space is small and pretty archaic. It is actually cheaper to buy new plants than rehab most of the old ones, so we generally throw them out. Sometimes when we are removing them, we will let people take them home. HOWEVER, if they are in poor enough shape that we are replacing them, they probably have a long-term pest or disease issue that we haven't been able to overcome, so most of them are likely to continue to decline in someone's home. Some companies have a strict policy against giving away plants for inventory control reasons.

Yeah, it's amazing what you can find in a planter. Old bandaids, toothpicks, half-eaten food, liquor bottles, used diapers(!). I had a coworker who swore someone was emptying a bedpan into a planter at a retirement home! Most of my clients aren't too trashy. My biggest problem is them dumping water into plants that don't want it. I've been doing the job for nearly two years now, and I actually like it a lot (most days). I'm an indoor plants person from age 6, so it's a good fit for me.

Joel - to get back to your questions...

Getting the appropriate plant for the amount of light and the temperature is a huge part of it. Next would be correct watering, which again depends on what kind of plant you have. Most people really overwater their plants. Most of the plants the professionals use don't need a great deal of water, which makes our lives easier. We also use larger plants in larger pots, again because larger pots can hold more water longer. We never use anything under a 6" pot because we couldn't keep it watered by visiting only once a week.

Soil mix is whatever comes from the nursery. Generally it's a well draining pro mix, sometimes lava rock for a few varieties of dracaenas or palms. We repot occasionally if a plant has been on the job for years and really needs it, using pro mix.

Drainage - we never plant directly into a planter. We use watertight planters, and we put the grow pot in a deep plastic saucer inside the planter. We try to water so that the plant doesn't sit in water for long, and if it does, we remove the whole thing the next week and dump the saucer out. There's nothing in the bottom of the actual grow pot for drainage, just the potting medium.

Fertilizers - we use a name brand of whatever we found on sale, such as Peters, MiracleGro, Osmocote. We fertilize only two to three times a year, spring, summer, maybe early fall. We are in the situation where we don't want the plants to grow too fast, or they'll outgrow their given space. Plus most of our plants are in low light offices and don't need a lot of fertilizer because of that.

I use the finger test a lot. Some of us use soil probes for the larger pots or plants that need to be really dry. Look for a metal probe, about 12 or 18 inches long. Plastic will do too, although they to break sooner. Don't waste your money on the electronic "soil moisture meters" you might see for sale at a garden center.

Some of us use a fairly strict watering schedule - a plant of a certain pot size and variety gets a certain amount of water every week or every other week. Those of us with more plant experience tend to temper that with the finger test, the soil probe, and common sense (more water when it's a sunny building, less water if it's been really cloudy or it's winter, more water when the heat is cranking, less when the A/C is cranking, etc.)

For growing in the home, adding as much humidity as you can afford and your family can stand will be a big plus for the plants and help limit pests like spider mites. I have a whole house humidifier, plus an extra room humidifier in my grow room. You also must examine plants frequently for pests and treat immediately before they can multiply and spread.

Experience is really your best teacher. Buy some good quality small plants to minimize your expense, and make your learning mistakes on them. Read lots of plants books - try your library - and web sites. Have fun with it!

I personally don't do as well with the outdoor stuff, especially the vegetables. I finally gave up on them altogether this year (using the veggie garden for tropical hibiscus now).

Hope that helps.

Watergal has (and others have, too) given you some excellent advice & a very good general idea how to get started. Now, if you want flawlessly beautiful houseplants, you'll have to select your plants and ask again for more specific answers...or describe your conditions and ask for suggestions of plants that could grow well there.
As Nancy mentioned, selecting the right variety is paramount. Think of someone asking, "How do you grow a gorgeous, healthy shrub?" Picking the right plant for the right place is just about as important with houseplants as it is with trees or shrubs.

My own list of top growing priorities would be lead off with a tie-- potting mix and light. A stagnant, poorly-draining potting mix will probably kill off a houseplant faster than light deficiency will, but if you want nice-looking plants, it's vital to have both good mix and good light.

An awful lot of houseplants don't look their best because they're not getting enough light. They are, in fact, slowly starving. Even most so-called "low light" plants benefit from a couple hours of direct morning sun.

If you have a good mix with both moisture retention and plenty of air space, that can make pot size and watering frequency much less critical. What exactly should be in the mix depends, again, on the plant. Some do well in highly organic, acidic mixes. Others like a "sweet" soil. A "drainage layer" in the bottom of the pot has been shown not to aid drainage at all, The same % of the mix itself will stay saturated, whether there's gravel below it, or just the pot's drainage hole. There should be some outlet for excess water to drain out, though.

Once those two issues are covered, most commonly-grown houseplants can take as much variation in temperature as we'd want to tolerate, and still look prime. There are some exceptions (like Episcias), but not among plants I've seen as "mall plants". ZZs are supposed to prefer warmth, but mine looks none the worse when temps are down in the 50's F.
As to the other elements-- it really depends on what plants you choose. Good air circulation is especially important to plants that are rot- or mildew prone, but I'd consider it fairly important for all. Humidity is critical to some, but matters very little to others. Some plants are heavy feeders, and others can go years with no added fertilizer and still look wonderful. That'll depend on both plant species, and growing conditions (as Watergal mentioned).
I don't think most experienced houseplant growers water according to a schedule. For one thing, as conditions (humidity, light, temp) change seasonally, our plants' need for water changes. Most houseplants don't go fully dormant in winter, but their growth often slows down a lot. We pay attention and water them, not because it's Thursday, but because they need water today. Plant services water on schedule not because it's the best way, but because the only feasible way to run a business. They get by, because conditions (general artificial lighting, etc.) are often a bit more consistent, and also because the generally larger pots/good drainage make watering is less critical.

I know you'd rather have definitive answers rather than so many "it depends"s...but we really can't give them. If there were just one set of hard and fast rules, everybody's houseplants would always look perfect! It takes some time and effort getting to know individual plants and what they do in your individual conditions. If you start with some of the easier ones, give good light, use a good mix-- you should have some nice-looking, highly gratifying plants to get you started.

The other thing you can do, if you have the facilities, is to rotate your plants the way the plant decorators do. I have some plants in my windowless office, but every Friday afternoon they go outisde for the weekend. Everything seems to be thriving.

Brenda

ooojen wrote: "If there were just one set of hard and fast rules, everybody's houseplants would always look perfect! It takes some time and effort getting to know individual plants and what they do in your individual conditions. If you start with some of the easier ones, give good light, use a good mix-- you should have some nice-looking, highly gratifying plants to get you started."

I agree, in a way. But when I started this thread, I did so on the basis of quite a number of years keeping indoor plants... with mixed results. Have had recent rather dismal results with a Christmas cactus and a variegated pothos.

My guess is, though, that there may be some generalities. I bet, for instance, that there is a crucial root-development period, after you get a smallish plant from a nursery or garden-supply department, when you've repotted it into a larger pot. At that point, probably, one wants to have the roots expand and get very strong, even if shoot and bloom development aren't yet becoming too showy. So factors like growing medium and fertilization might be crucial. I'd think this would give a good basis. Of course, the fact that rather few of us are in a position to provide greenhouse-like temperature, humidity, and light conditions may be a limitation (at this stage... possibly later stages, too?).

This is maybe more what my question is about, although plant-service practices of plant removal and replacement (and other professional practices) are interesting in themselves.

Joel

Sheesh, people put all sorts of garbage in plants in stores too. Years of retail sales to the public in high volumn stores taught me that. Many people are so rude.

joel, root development is of course important and is indeed what the plant focuses on when it is moved to a larger pot. Many people move plants into larger pots in one big step - you should only move a small plant into a pot that is one or two inches wider in diameter, let it grow there until it's potbound, then move up one or two more inches again. Bigger plants can go maybe three or four inches up (10" to 14" to 17" to 21" are typical industry sizes).

Check your potting mix. Some of them come with added fertilizer already in them and if you are also adding your own fertilizer, it will be too much and burn the roots.

Do you have fairly good light? Dim indoor light is a big problem for lots of people.

Can you give specifics about some of your problem plants - what were the "dismal results"?

Watergal wrote: "Check your potting mix. Some of them come with added fertilizer already in them and if you are also adding your own fertilizer, it will be too much and burn the roots.

"Do you have fairly good light? Dim indoor light is a big problem for lots of people.

"Can you give specifics about some of your problem plants - what were the "dismal results"?"

My dismal results (thank goodness they don't happen all the time, mind you) include: Plants ceasing growth, even without root binding. Plants getting waterlogged, even on watering schedules of once a week or less (and even more infrequently, during winter). By the way, I use unglazed clay pots to wick out any excess moisture.

I generally use a growing medium mixture of 50% fine-ground bark "mulch" and 50% coir. It's light. But I think maybe I should be putting some perlite in... maybe 10 or 15%?

I use very occasional Miracle Grow, mixed as directed. I even less frequently throw in a touch of manufactured urea, due to the fact that the MG I'm using is the "all purpose" type and is low in nitrogen.

I live at about the 50th parallel, above Washington State, in Zone 6. Wintery weather is about four months long. Light can be dim during that period My dining room is my main plant room, and the only supplemental light there is a two-incandescent-bulb ceiling light. Most of my plants (heartleaf philodendron, "Orange Flash," Christmas cactus, etc) are said to be happy with indirect light. I've got a big sheflera right at the window, though I move it slightly away during the colder months.

Joel

Sounds like you have good plant choices for your environment. It is normal for plants to go dormant during the winter, during which time they don't grow at all and use little water. Clay pots are good for your needs. I would add the perlite in the future. I would definitely wait to water until the top of the soil is bone dry in the winter, esp. for philos, cactus, and scheffleras. I keep my own plants really dry - sometimes they go several weeks between watering, and it's not quite as dreary here as it can get in Washington.

If your plants aren't rootbound, don't put them in larger pots. Wait until they get rootbound first. And when you do repot them, gently open up the bottom of the rootball with your fingers by pulling, so that the roots are untangled and can spread out into the new soil - otherwise, they might just continue to grow around in circles in the existing ball shape.

I'm not sure about the urea. I vaguely remember reading that urea based fertilizers aren't as good as other types of nitrogen, but I can't remember why - I'm not much of a chemist.

Don't fertilize at all in the winter. Start in spring and stop in fall. The plants want to be dormant in the winter, so don't try to push growth with food.

I work in a wholesale/retail greenhouse/nursery/garden center.

We get orders every so often from the same interiorscape companies/businesses for specific large specimen plants.

We have to pick the best for them & we're also required to prune, water & leaf shine then sleeve them for the order.

The same goes for orders to florists.

I have no idea what the interiorscapers do with the old ones, probably throw them in the dumpster.

I work at a medical center. And if it werent for me they would have done the same things malls, hospitals, and offices do throughout the U.S. Instead of taking care of something, they would water it whenever they saw fit, and the shape of the plants showed it.

Lots of strange growth, big lush leaves when you could tell the watering was great and everything was good. And then times of neglect with dwindly growth and poor leaf development. Most people with uninhibited income can buy whatever they want, constantly bringing in new plants, and getting rid of the older ones that look like crap because of their ignorance to them.

But like all house plant lovers something had to be done and i did just that.

I find that although watering, good potting media, proper light and all that jazz is great for plants. i believe the first and last thing a plant needs is love and care. If you can actually put yourself into a plant to make it come back from near death, that makes that plant that much stronger. knowing that you're the one that feeds it, and gives it water, and a great place to live. Sure lighting and water routines help out. But it all comes down to how you do it, and how well.

I think the more you like a plant, the more it will grow for you.

I bought cactus's. something i have never been able to grow. I have a cactus that put on 6 inches of new growth... and its not even outside. Because this time i promised that i would keep it alive, and made the promise to the plant.

now i sound like im nuts.

anyways.

Love is number 1. all the other facts come after.

ooojen - about the zz's and warmth, we have found at work that they are one of the best plants to handle cold or drafty entryways (along with rhapis palms). I guess the thick leaves on the zz's protect them from the elements. However, they do grow much better in warm sun!

Watergal-- That's interesting! I guess I'm not terribly surprised, since mine has never balked at cool temps. I suppose the "conventional wisdom" came from people overwatering the plants when they were cool.
It also seems that practically every text I've read about ZZ's recommends only indirect light for them-- no direct sun. With outdoor east exposure, full sun half the day, mine grew like crazy and bloomed up a storm. What they'll tolerate seems to be recommended more than what will actually make them thrive.

This is an extremely interesting thread!

About people dumping coffee into office-building planters: someone once told me that if I had leftover coffee in my coffeemaker, I could dump it on my houseplants after it had cooled. I did it once or twice, always mixed with water, but it kind of freaked me out, so I never thoroughly tested the theory. I think the idea was that there were nutrients in the coffee. I'm just putting this out there to see if anyone else has heard this - I'm sure the office workers had cream and sugar in theirs, and THAT can't be good for the plants!

I think coffee is a source of nitrogen, so if I use it on plants I always water it down. Don't think sugar would hurt, but I don't think cream would be so good! I read on the compost forum that coffee grounds are excellent to add to your compost pile, and that it's a 'green'. Always tickles me to think that coffee grounds are green! As for the urea mentioned earlier--I think urea is a form of nitrogen that requires bacterial action to break down. Anyway, there was a lot of excitement in African Violet circles a few years ago to the effect that plants in containers couldn't handle it properly, I think because we use non-organic mixes--usually sphagnum peat moss, perlite, and vermiculite--which can't break it down properly and the plants get rings around their leaves and other less-desirable problems.

I wouldn't recommend coffee, especially with cream or sugar (would attract bugs, molds, etc, yuck). However, several years ago when we had water restrictions during a drought, I saved my leftover coffee, iced tea, dishwater, cooking water, basically anything liquid that wasn't sweetened, and used it on my outdoor potted and inground plants because it was the only thing I could legally use. They did fine for a couple of months that way. I figured it was better than no water at all. But I still wouldn't encourage people to do it!

Hi Joel,

You started a good thread.

My top six priorities would be
1. Adequate light
2. Adequate light
3. Adequate light
4. Adequate light
5. Adequate water (evenly moist media) using either soil-based or expanded clay pebble sub-irrigation (aka hydroculture).
6. Scouting for pests and pest management

If you are really interested in the "secrets" of professional interior plantscaping spend some time on the Plants-in-Buildings website. Kenneth Freeman, the primary author deserves the equivalent of an Academy Award for this website. I would gladly carry his briefcase for what I would learn from him. IMO this is the most educational and informative website about indoor plants on the web with no close second.

Read what he has to say about sub-irrigation (commonly and erroneously called self-watering).

Read what he has to say about digital light meters (PDF file).

Buy a digital foot-candle (or more widely available lux ) light meter. eBay is a good place to buy one. It will cost less than a good quality kitchen knife. You will pay for the meter from your savings not having to replace dead plants. Using window direction, distance from a window and hand-shadows as means of measuring light for indoor plants are highly inaccurate methods. They are a guess at best. I've measured light differences within a foot that could mean the difference between a healthy or unhealthy plant.

You can buy a digital lux reading (10 lux = about 1 foot-candle) meter (with a case) on eBay currently for about $35 delivered! If the meter reads 1,000 lux that's about 100 foot-candles. It's very easy to read a lux meter and convert to f.c. by simply moving one decimal point to the left. I'll gladly help you or anyone else select one to buy.

Plants-in-Buildings has arguably the best plant selector guide on the web. It the plant you're interested in isn't included here I'd suggest forgetting about it being a good year round indoor plant.

Hope this was of help. Good luck with your plants.

Greenscaper

That's quite a good site, with a lot of excellent information (a little schmaltz thrown in, but a lot of good info).
...and there, straight from the horse's mouth, is the same kind of "it really depends" information that many of us said initially.
On potting mix:
"A wide variety of growing media are used by interior landscapers. They all have their advantages and faults and it is quite a complex science to work out which growing media work best in different situations."
On light:
"Plant light requirements vary around the World due to the different conditions under which the plants were grown ..."
On temperature and humidity:
"One of the most important skills that an interior landscaper possesses is the ability to match a plant to its indoor environment."
Unfortunately, there's no magic pebble for upscale interior plantscapers, either.

I'd strongly disagree about the plant selector guide list containing every good potential houseplant, though! There are only 217 on the list! Those are undoubtedly some of the best for public areas, but trust me, there are many, many more that can make excellent, consistently attractive houseplants.

My husband is a wholesale floral/plant distributer. He sells to many of the interior plantscape nurseries and florists. Most nurseries toss the plants that they replace unless it's a hard to find or an extremely expensive specimen. The mark-up on plants and flowers is very high. What the customer pays $80 for costs my husband about $10 and is sold to the florist for $18-$25. It's just not worth the trouble to rehabilitate most plants when the florist/interior plantscaper has already made their money off the rental or sale of the plant. Unless the returned plants are given to the employees most are chopped up so that people don't go digging through their dumpsters.
Karyn

Hi-
Just came across your inquiry. The advice given by others sounds worthy of follow-up. We had been in the building automation business and made and sold automated, irrigation systems used in homes, offices and commercial facilities. Auomation can help with watering and lighting. Our patented APM (automated, precision micro-irrigation) systems had been on the market for years. They were built into new or retrofit structures to water mainly container plants and were generally part of a comprehensive building automation system capable of doing many things, including providing supplementary lighting. Simpler systems were available as well. What I'm trying to tell you is that used properly, automation can solve many irrigation and mainntenance labor problems in homes and indoor commercial growing situations. One of the problems traditionally facing interior landscape firms is that of pay scales and labor turnover. Automation reduces labor content in all situations, but has considerable economic benefits in contractural plant-care situations. The bottom line is, that automation is not a complete replacement for manual plant maintenance for other matters have to be attended to, but does save enormous amounts of time and money when it comes to the irrigation tasks... irrigation is the main time-consumer.