Gardendaze

This collection of plants was part of a dish garden that my neighbor received a little over a year ago when her husband passed away. She has nurtured it quite beautifully, but she professed to be “no good with plants” and passed it along to me for transplanting and safekeeping.

What you might be able to tell from this photo is how pot-bound it was. Look at the tangle of roots where I have already cut out one of the plants. Despite that, the little dish garden was really thriving. I only had to remove a little bit of decay from the palm and some die back on the maranta (prayer plant–and they can be a little finicky anyway) and the rest of the plants were in really good shape.

What’s also very interesting about the collection of plants in this dish garden is that with the exception of the maranta, they are all known to be great plants for cleaning the air.

Perhaps it’s not easy to see what’s in the dish garden from these photos. There was the little palm that I previously mentioned, and the prayer plant. There were 2 dracaenas, a variegated one and a variety called ‘Janet Craig,’ which is smaller. There was a philodendron and a peace lily (spathophilum). It’s really a nice little collection of plants.

And this is the end result once the plants were all separated and potted up. I asked my neighbor if there was at least one that she would like to keep but she said no. So my house plant collection has been significantly enriched by this!