Welcome to the Houseplant Clinic
Culture Study x Garden Study
AHP Note: My best-laid plans to finish up Sunday’s essay were exploded on Thursday afternoon when I was battling some ivy and my very sharp clippers got in the way — I’m totally fine, just had to spend most of Friday in town getting some stitches. So we’re doing a Garden Study crossover event instead….and a new essay will be coming for you next week.
What is Garden Study? It’s a newsletter within a newsletter — a place to hear about other people’s gardens and plants and gardening philosophies and talk, in a very Garden Study-informed way, about yours. It’s for the garden-curious and people who’ve been gardening for decades and people who have one houseplant and people who have fifty. It’s for anyone who’s accidentally killed a plant, which means it’s for all of us.
You can get a good sense of previous Garden Study content here — and I’ll list a few of my favorites below:
We do Q&As, seed and tuber exchanges, and a lot of crowdsourcing and relying on others’ knowledge — which is what we’re doing today with Houseplant Clinic.
I asked Garden Study readers to send me pictures of their struggling houseplants and what’s going on with them, and we’ll try our best to help diagnosis. (You can also ask questions about *your* houseplants in the comments — I’ll explain more on how below).
If this sort of thing is of interest to you, just remember that you must *opt-in* to get Garden Study in your inbox — even if you’re already subscribed to Culture Study. Here’s the very simple instructions on how to do so.
Now let’s doctor some ailing houseplants:
PATIENT #1: SULLEN PHILODENDRON BIRKIN
OWNER NOTES:
It was doing great for a long time, growing healthy leaves and looking full and happy in a hanging pot in a west-facing window where it didn't get totally blasted with light all day but it was pretty bright, and I water with distilled water (we have very hard water in Kansas City) whenever it's feeling dry.
I periodically add a liquid tropical plant fertilizer to the water, too. It started looking kind of stunted and not growing new leaves late last year and instead ended up with this red/white bulb-like mass in the center of the plant. For a while I thought it was having some kind of too-much-light stress and moved it into a room with shady north & east facing windows + a grow light, but things are stalled out with this bulb situation peeling layers of itself off periodically.
At first I wondered if this was how philodendrons flower, but now I'm wondering if it's just not fully producing new leaves now and this bulb situation is just stunted leaves that never fully grow? I'd love to know if this has happened to anyone else, if the plant ever snaps out of it, etc.