Episode 216: houseplant gift baskets
A houseplant gift basket with a birdsfoot English ivy, flaming Katy, parlour palm, Dracaena ‘Janet Craig’ and a fern. Photograph: Maksim Shebeko.
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You’ve been given a houseplant gift basket - now what? Find out how to care for them, and what to do when they start to look miserable.
Check out the notes below as you listen…
What is a houseplant gift basket? It’s a group of plants potted into a wicker basket or other similar container, usually dominated by widely-available foliage plants and ‘florists’ flowering plants’. Usually the basket is lined with plastic. Occasionally you’ll find the basket is just filled with inidividually potted plants that you can pot up as you wish.
What plants generally feature? The template for these baskets is usually pretty similar:
A trailing plant such as an English ivy (Hedera helix), devil’s ivy (Epipremnum aureum), Dracaena marginata or a heartleaf Philodendron (Philodendron hederaceum).
A upright plant such as a parlour palm (Chamaedorea elegans), a croton (Codiaeum variegatum), a Dracaena such as ‘Janet Craig’ or a leopard lily (Dieffenbachia sp)..
Flowering plants such as flaming Katy (Kalanchoe blossfeldiana), cyclamen (Cyclamen persicum), pot Chrysanthemum, African violet (Streptocarpus sect. Saintpaulia) or gerberas.
Clumping foliage plants such as Marantas, polka dot plants (Hypoestes phyllostachya) and the nerve plant (Fittonia argyroneura).
Sometimes outside plants are included, such as small cypress trees, mini roses and primroses. These can all grow indoors but generally do much better outdoors.
Photograph: Cloudlet.
In spring, baskets often consists of a range of spring bulbs, including muscari, daffodils, hyacinths, crocuses and tulips. These will need to be dismatneled as soon as the leaves start to die back. The bulbs can be planted outside, or dried off and kept in a paper bag for replanting in autumn. People often claim that hyacinths from these setups will not flower again when they are planted in the garden, but in my experience most of them bloom really well! Some will be a little more sparse than the original flower, but most come back exactly the same year after year, so don’t just throw them on the compost heap!
What do you do with a gift basket when you get it home? The main decision is whether you take them apart immediately, or leave them as is for few days, weeks, months or even years: it’s a question of whether you enjoy the aesthetics of the arrangement, and whether the selection of plants have similar care needs. They key is that as soon as the plants show signs of stress, such as wilting leaves, mass leaf drop or browning leaves, it’s time to take action.
If you keep the basket as is, the key to success is careful watering - you want the substrate to get damp, but not allow there to be water gathering at the base of the plastic liner. Make sure you protect your furniture or whatever the basket is sitting on, as the plastic liner is no guarantee they won’t leak! I like inexpensive cork trivets/coasters for this job. After about six weeks you will need to start fertilising the plants.
Eventually your basket will need to be broken up as this is not a long-term planting choice in most cases. When you do break up your basket, don’t feel bad about giving away the plants you do not want. Carefully remove the plants soil and all, and have a look at the roots, checking for rot, and teasing out the roots so they can begin to grow into the new substrate. If you can knock off the old substrate from the roots, do so, but this is not always easy if the plant has fine fibrous roots. Do take a cocktail stick, kebab stick or similar and make some holes in the rootball to help water and air to permeate. You can pot up plants individually, or plant them in a grouped container according to similar care needs for light, heat and water. Sink a test tube or shot glass into these mixed planters and you can enjoy a “pot-et-fleur” arrangement, adding cut flowers as a seasonal feature.
Wondering what to do with the basket? give to charity/thrift store, use it for storage or harvesting produce from the garden, or keep it to plant spring bulbs in in the autumn. If you don’t like the “bo peep'“ handle, cut it off with a pair of secateurs or a pruning saw and sand down the sharp bits to leave you with a more useful receptacle.
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CREDITS
This week's show featured the tracks Dill Pickles by the Heftone Banjo Orchestra, Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops, The Road We Use To Travel When We Were Kids by Komiku and Plantation by Jason Shaw.