Monsteras and Mondays. Their images have been smacked on everything for some years now and for one am happy that people (cool young people) have gone coo coo for houseplants in recent years. Unlike the finnicky ass fiddle leaf fig that was and maybe still is crazy popular, monsteras are so much more fun to grow. I found this guy as a super big one-gallon for under twenty bucks at the Half Moon Bay Nursery a couple years ago. The child was not included. Her Idaho shirt was originally mine back in the 80’s.
Check it out back in San Francisco all happy and hanging out in the alley with our giant Philodendron selloum we gave to our neighbors before we moved to Davis. It always had a weird fungus-like spotting on the leaves I never bothered to look up when it lived there and now it’s gone.
So I’ve been an “interiorscaper” “plant tech” or my personal self named favorite, “plant janitor” taking care of fancy ass tech office houseplants and “living walls” and didn’t say much about it online. This my favorite interior office wall I took care of. I never worked for the folks who designed and installed it, and am not sure who they were, but they did good!
The simplicity of the tray/wick system is wonderful and makes it easy to rearrange the plants. I’ve seen pretty much every terrible thing that can happen with a living wall and trust me, there are lots of terrible things that can happen and they usually involve water going places it shouldn’t. In almost all cases I would tell people to steer clear of living walls, but if you really have to use this. My favorite wall was in an office on the 30 something floor in SF’s financial district that overlooked the entire bay and had no additional overhead light. I only had to go water and trim out the dead stuff every two weeks to keep it looking great.
I don’t remember where we bought it or where the pot came from, but I tortured this poor thing on the top of our Outer Sunset fridge for quite some time with way less water than it wanted. I was still figuring stuff out back then… and monsteras aren’t water hogs or anything, but I was pretty lazy in the watering department and still am, but most folks kill their houseplants with too much water rather than not enough. You’ll find that most of the houseplants I advocate for can deal with and often enjoy prolonged periods of drought without throwing a tantrum.
We just moved this guy back outside to it’s happy place yesterday, and it’s looking a little awkward after I tied it up to a new stake. I’ll update with more houseplant posts since we have a lot of them and I have a sweet spot for quite a few.
Far Out Flora 