Al.

~gabe

Lolol - thanks!

That we usually go to a book for care instructions about a particular plant is the reason I've never found a book about houseplants that I like, mainly because they all give so much conflicting information (compared to other authors) and they all say the same thing in different words about huge classes of plants w/o really telling you anything specific about individual plants. Books often leave the grower with the impression that every plant requires its own specific care regimen in order to be kept happy, but most of the care instructions are based on the plant's tolerance for adversity, rather than what it actually prefers. We don't need to buy into the idea that plants require very different sets of care instructions ..... because they don't. Cacti are a little different because they are extremely intolerant of wet feet, and a very few succulents are similar in that regard - especially in periods where they enter a situational dormancy; but by and large, a huge % of the plants we grow indoors want and will prosper under exactly the same care regimen, which pivots on our ability to keep the root system happy and providing an appropriate amount of light.

I treat everything I grow the same, maybe other than providing some shade for plants intolerant of intense or direct sunlight. They are all in a soil that drains almost perfectly (that means to the point there is no water between soil particles - only air), so I don't need to worry about over-watering (not even the succulents). This also makes fertilizing monkey easy.

Once you start experimenting with providing a high quality home for roots, you'll discover that the sweet spot at which houseplants grow best is almost universal, while the limits of what houseplants will tolerate varies widely. Worry about the sweet spot and you'll be able to forget entirely about the plant's ability to deal with conditions at the fringes of what it was genetically programmed to tolerate, which is central to the inability of many growers to keep plants healthy.

Valued books:

Plant Production in Containers II ~ Carl Whitcomb PhD (fairly easy reading)

Water, Media, and Nutrition for Greenhouse Crops ~ a Ball book (easy reading)

Botany for Gardeners ~ Brian Capon (very easy reading, gives a basic overview of how plants work. I often recommend it because understanding physiology is a key to growing proficiency)

Plant Physiology ~ Mohr & Schopfer (tough sledding if no background in botany/ horticulture)

Plant Physiology ~ Taiz & Zeiger (again - tough sledding w/o some background)

Mineral Nutrition of Higher Plants ~ Petra Marschner (tough sledding w/o background)

Plant Pathology ~ Agrios (tough sledding w/o background)

Soils for Ornamental Plants and Turf ~ Handreck and Black (fairly easy reading)

Hamiltons Commercial Indoor Plants ~ Hamilton (easy reading - closest thing I've seen to a decent book on houseplants, but the longer it remains out of print and not updated, the more obsolete its information will become. It already has a lot of inaccurate info, i.e. based on today's knowledge.

Al