This Week In Houseplants

Let's fill the bathroom with plants

As a messy person with a tendency to acculumulate rubbish I try to minimise the amount of storage I have available. It sounds counterintuitive, but the more room I have, the more crap I’ll collect.

Therefore, when we had our bathroom redone, we went with minimal storage options. Bathrooms are terrible places to store things so we only really needed room to keep some toilet rolls and cleaning supplies in there. We have a shower caddy for shower gel etc so I just bought a £30 shoe rack from amazon that works a treat.

Buuut as summer approaches my desire to fill every space in my house with plants amplifies, and whilst the bathroom functions perfectly, aesthetically it left something to be desired.

Pinterest influenced me, so I bought one of those over the toilet shelving units.

This is the one I got (that’s an affiliate link so click away BUT I’m not 100% recommending this atm for reasons we shall discuss).

I LOVE the way it looks but the jury’s still out on whether we’re gonna whack our heads when we sit on the toilet.

We have skirting boards so the stand isn’t flush to the wall so it’s just a weeny bit deep.

By the way, it’s been two weeks and I’m yet to catch a single thrips on those blue sticky things. I have been a good plant caregiver though, and thrips numbers are decreasing quickly. I swear they seek out lonely, neglected plants.

The trailing plant in the picture above needs repotting and chopping/propping DESPERATELY.

Anyway, we’re gonna live with the shelves for a while and see how much it gets in the way. If it’s too much of a faff I’m going to wedge it next to my desk and use it as storage there.

I’ll let you know how we get on with in BUT I do think we have a particularly streamlined toilet (a sentence I never thought I’d write) so this is probably find for a standard one.

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You can tell spring is on the way when maidenhair ferns start growing. I’ve said this a million times before but the key to these fellas is to keep them close to you - mine lives on the coffee table so it’s constantly in my line of sight.

I have a care guide here, but the key things are:

1. More light than you’d think. Mine’s about five feet from a south-facing window, so long hours of light, but not full on. Definitely not one for a dark corner

2. Don’t let them dry out. The fronds are delicate and crisp up so quickly. Don’t worry if they fronds do crisp up - they can’t be revived (unless you’re incredibly quick) but you can snip them off and more will grow. The roots are actually pretty resilient, though the fronds are NOT.

First leaf in the prop box! Philodendron verrucosum are a pain to rootbut I’m taking this as a good sign (even though that leaf was 98.6% formed when I took the cutting so it probs doesn’t realise it’s a cutting yet)

THe terrarium is doing really well - I’m still umming and ahhing about taking out the obliqua becaue it’s already too tall but it’s doing so well that I keep putting it off. Ignore the Aglaonema’s yellow leaf to the left - it’s growing a new one and that one was pretty old.

I seem to have a forked flower spike on my orchid, which I’m choosing to believe is a good thing.

I also got some new plant shelves - just some cheap ones to go in the big window.

This one, if you’re interested.

It’s not fully styled yet because I’ve not really had chance (too busy building bathroom shelves) but I’m very excited. The only issue I’ve had with it so far is that the shelves aren’t flat - they’re slightly higher in the middle so you can’t cram multiple plants onto one shelf because they’re lopsided will slip off.

Please excuse the cage - it’s to protect the plants from the rabbits.

In my experience rabbits are pretty good at picking non-toxic plants to eat but I still put my hoya and peperomia on lower shelves so should Holly manage to turn into a gas and fit through the bars she can’t get into too much trouble. Though knowing her she’s rather chew on the wood than eat the leaves.

Does anyone have one of these plant stands and have any cool tips for styling it? Look how sad my Cebu Blue is in the middle 😫 (it’s actually the plant directly above the word ‘middle’). It got the brunt of the thrips because it was surrounded by Hoya and Hoya are bit more difficult for them to eat*. My poor sacrificial lamb. I have some cuttings and I have no doubt he’ll make a full recovery.

*Except for Hoya eskimo, which was apparently delicios to thrips - it’s diagonally above and to the right of the cebu blue, behind the Hoya compacta.

Have a great week! I have an exam next Friday and plan on drinking wine on the evening so you might not get next week’s newsletter until Sunday. Apologies.