Stronger Healthier Plants With A Foundation To Last

Not So Friendly Flora

Spending a few decades as a Botanical Horticulturalist and Nurseryman, the unfortunate origin story of most of our beloved house plants became too obvious to ignore. The untold truth is that the overwhelming majority of greenery that find their way to our window sills come with some serious baggage. While some of our new planty roommates may have obvious ties to their rocky past, they often bring pests such as spider mite, fungus gnats, and mealybugs into your greenscapes. Whether you’re an experienced plant collector or glowing new plant parent, bringing these pests home can result in laborious pest management routines that slow the growth and health of our plants or even in the worst of cases, resulting in complete loss of your indoor jungle. However, the most damaging aspects of their past lives often go unseen and unknown.

A Long Road Home

While the European Horticultural landscape has evolved to have a much less dramatic ecological footprint than us in the United States, the process remains roughly the same. Whether buying plants from your local nursery center or even boutique plant shop, the mileage that plants will travel before coming to be pampered in your home can be anywhere between 3,000 and 8,000 miles. Moreover, plants can be bought and sold from 2-4 times on average before you carry them home. While the original growers of these plants will provide somewhat optimal environmental conditions and take care to ensure a pest and disease free plant, that care is rarely taken downstream as these plants are bought and sold multiple times. In this time, the stresses that our beloved plants will endure will often compound irreparably, if not given the precise optimal conditions for rehabilitation which are rarely found inside our homes.

A Flawed Foundation

While we do our best as plant parents to research care tips and read plant labels at our favorite nursery to make sure that our home can keep our new friend happy, often the biggest upsets only show themselves with time. Sometimes even with exhausting all our resources as a plant parent we still find that some plants lack the vigor, growth, and resilience we would expect. These issues often stem not from the way that plant was brought into this world (seed, cut propagation, tissue culture,) but the parent plant itself they originate from. In the past 20 years, tissue culture has become the most widely used method of propagation. This technique ensures that each new plant divided from the parent plant will have the exact growth traits of the parent plant. While this method of propagation can offer a cost effective way to produce large volumes of plants, often the care is not taken to ensure vigorous, fast growing, disease and pest resistant genetics. Inevitably, spreading a copy of the same slow growing and problematic genetics by the thousands.