A few evenings a year, I jump in my car with a tray of 'stunt plants' and a projector and drive to a small to medium sized village or town to give a talk about houseplants to a gardening society or club.
This is usually not a venue where I'll be preaching to the converted: usually they are not nurturing a whole jungle of houseplants, focusing instead on outdoor gardens and allotments. But it reminds me that for most of the time, I operate in a bubble where everyone knows what an aroid is and how to dispatch a mealy bug with impunity.
Sometimes it's good to see what's going on outside that niche. There are, if these gatherings are anything to go by, people doing things to their houseplants that would make most of us have a heart attack, such as repotting them into garden soil, religiously watering their peace lily once a week in the depths of winter whether it needs it or not, and cutting the leaves off their moth orchids because they seem a pointless feature. (I am not saying this to be smug. Put me in a room with a bunch of entomologists or detectorists and they'd feel the same way about me.)
Could you guess at the most common question posed by these audiences?
It is "how do I get my moth orchid/Strelitzia/peace lily to rebloom"? This is a good question, but there is no one simple answer, which can be a bit awkward when you have about one minute to give a cogent response. Many houseplants bought in flower have been manipulated into that state - often by day length or application of certain hormones, such as gibberellin for peace lilies. Once they adapt to the conditions in their new home, they stop flowering because the stimulus is no longer there. It may be up to a year before flowers appear again as the plant regains its natural cycle.
Some plants - cacti and Strelitzia (bird of paradise) in particular - are even sold with fake flowers attached to fool consumers into thinking they are getting a currently-flowering plant when they are not. Some species will only flower once they reach a stage of maturity - this is true with Strelitzia in particular, and also the snake plant, Sanseveria trifasciata.
If you want flowers, the best course of action is to take really good care of your plant, and the rest should follow. In the case of moth orchids, the advice used to be to try to give plants a day/night temperature differential of a few degrees centigrade, but Phalaenopsis breeding is so extensive now that I suspect this requirement has been bred out of a lot of modern hybrids. A shortage of light is another potential cause, because we usually underestimate plants' light needs, particularly in the case of Strelitzia which really will take all the sunshine you can throw at it - just remember to increase light leaves gradually to avoid sunburn.
Bear in mind, though, that some plants are extremely unlikely to flower and it isn't your fault at all - they just aren't in the right conditions in your home, such as most of the Opuntia genus, including the bunny ears cactus Opuntia microdasys - this won't generally flower in a pot, only in the ground. Other just aren't genetically set up to flower much - the best example being the Epipremnum aureum or golden pothos, which has managed to become one of the most ubiquitous houseplants in the world despite only blooming a handful of times in the last few decades. (You can read more about why this is in my book Legends of the Leaf, by the way!)
No new episode of my podcast On The Ledge this week, but why not check out my interviews for other shows? There's a list here.
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