Bad news first: If it seems totally crispy, I would be concerned that your Norfolk Island Pine may have died. Are any of the branches moist and flexible, or do the branches all seem dry and easily broken? It might help if you post a photo of it. Good news: The plant in your picture looks to me like what is often called a "Golden Pothos" (aka Epipremnum aurea). They are relatives of philodendrons but actually are not philos. Check this link to confirm its identity. The good news is that pothos are very tough plants that can survive a lot. Your pothos doesn't look to me like it is dying. I think it was just sunburned because its leaves were not adapted to such intense light when you put it outside. Sunburn is ugly to us but it doesn't really hurt the plant. The soil it is in looks a bit heavy and moist, so you want to be careful not to overwater it. The risk is that it might develop root rot if it is in a heavy soil that stays soggy too long. I personally do not put my houseplants outside because there is a risk that insect pests may find the plant outside. However, I'm not sure that is such a big deal when you only have a couple of plants, since it is easier to get rid of pest problems on plants when you only have one or two than if you have a lot like I do. Many people do find their plants grow better if they get a summer vacation, and they just spray the plant with a pesticide before they bring the plants inside during the fall to prevent insects from coming in with the plant. If you do decide to summer your plant outside, many indoor plants will do better if you start them off in a shady place outside, because even a shady spot outside is brighter than the level of light they received indoors. Once they are used to being in the shade you can move them somewhere sunny. The brown parts (the burned parts) will not turn green again, but over time it will grow more leaves to replace the brown ones. One nice thing about pothos is that it is extremely easy to propagate. You can clip off one of the longer vines on it (make sure you get a piece that has at least one brown nubbin on the stem - the brown nubbins are where roots forms). Put the vine in a glass of water, and put it in front of the window. Eventually the vine will grow some roots. I would recommend taking some cuttings so that, no matter what happens to the original plant, you'll still have some of it. Pothos cuttings can actually live in plain water for a pretty long time, so you don't have to be in a rush to pot them. This post was edited by summersunshine on Sat, May 10, 14 at 12:17

Don't plant it within 100 feet of anything you care about. It's not invasive, but they're extremely brittle. One across the street came down in a mild March thunderstorm - not a hurricane - a couple years ago, crushing my boyfriend's car. The storm snapped it off at 10 feet above the ground. The ten-foot stump finally came down in a thunderstorm a few months ago, taking out a neighbor's fence. (these were planted in the right-of-way and the whole neighborhood had to beg the city to take its twin out.) They also tend to get kind of scraggly looking as they get taller. They don't keep that pretty conical shape down here. And because they get so tall, taking one out can require a tree guy with a cherry picker to top it several times in order to get rid of it without endangering nearby houses (had to do that in another house years ago, it's expensive.) I'd advise against anyone down here planting them. I know Geico would.

NIP is an extremely popular houseplant and will typically do quite well inside the average home. II find it very difficult to believe that you found a lot of websites claiming it to be difficult to grow inside...because it isn't! If your home became exceedingly dry over the winter, that would pose a problem for your plants as well as you. Humidifiers can make life a bit better for all. Also be sure that the plant is situated away from drafts and heat vents. However, if lack of humidity was the real problem, I think that the needles would drop fairly quickly. I'll suggest that your little plant might be infested with the primary pest of NIPs, spider mites. They are probably the number one reason for the browning of the needles. So, have you seen any signs of spider mites? Another possibility is that it wasn't watered properly (too much, too little), or over fertilized. As with all containerized plants, we have to find the right balance of light, water, and other factors. If I were you, I'd do all that I could to raise the humidity in the room where the NIP is. Misting does nothing to help with this problem, other than keeping the dust off (a good thing) and perhaps helping control mites, if they are present.

" I could kick myself because years ago, I passed up a nice sized specimen." You passed on a specimen whose carcass you might have been digging out of the ground this week, when the record rains of early summer killed it. As I'm always saying, at least hundreds, probably thousands, of (expensive, usually) monkey puzzles have been planted by gardeners along the east coast since the 60s and before, and yet we hardly know of many mature specimens. I can't remember if you are on LI or in NJ, but either place should have plenty of mature specimens - as they do of other desirable, sufficiently-hardy collectibles of the 20th century like Sequoiadendron. Just in my random existence, not even involving contact with collectors of rare plants, I know of one in the neighborhood in Columbia, MD, where I briefly lived in the mid 2000s that was killed off by a wet spell one summer. I never even spoke to the person who owned it, I just noticed it prominently planted in their yard. It was 8' tall and had probably been there a few years, looked established and healthy one year but was gone the next. I once found a primary source/gardening journal in google books from the 1920s attesting to their difficulty in CONUS non-maritime climates! Specifically on Long Island IIRC. It's pretty clear that in places with cool summers to their liking, winters are too cold, and where winters are sufficiently mild, summers are too hot. The one at Polly Hill Arboretum has supposedly died back a few times, to the trunk. (that's just what their website once said about it: seems a bit implausible to me but the take home message is: was probably planted decades ago, yet is not a mature specimen even in that somewhat benign climate. NB the Fairweather guys claimed to have found a huge Austrocendrus on Cape Cod or the islands, which would have been the only one of the east coast) The known US east coast ones over 25' are: The Barnes Arboretum (who also had the horticultural savvy to bring the northernmost Sequoia on the east coast to maturity: the key for both probably just leaving them alone and not "feeding" them), the one in Bethesda MD that survived <<0F in 1994, and one at an old estate in Wilmington, DE, that was cut down for "not looking English enough." (the best of all possible anecdotes concerning the overall idiocy of most people who practice so-called "landscape architecture" in this country)