Earlier this week, I walked by this window and noticed this wilting succulent. Now more plants, particularly cacti and succulents are generally killed by over-watering, not under-watering. Then there’s my house.

My house is generally on the cooler side, especially in the winter, so keeping a plant, particularly a cactus or succulent too wet is certain death for it.

Other plants that also prefer a bit of dryness–philodendron and citrus come to mind here–also don’t mind the coolness of my home so long as I don’t drown them.

So I always tend to err in that direction.

But now that we are into late March–soon to be April–and the sun is getting warmer, I need to be mindful that certain plants might need a bit more water than they needed in December, say.

I have been checking for–and sadly already finding–the little insects that love to make themselves known with more sunlight and warmer days.

So take a lesson from me–plants don’t like “tough love!”

This poor snake plant (dracena zeylanica, formerly sansevieria zeylanica) has taken matters into its own leaves, so to speak, and decided to literally bust out of its container. It has broken through the pot and now is migrating down my windowsill. Clearly it is a priority that I re-pot it come May.

Here’s a slightly better view so that you can see what’s going on.

And despite the fact that it clearly wants to get out of that container, it’s also about to bloom.

By the way, notice the backyard through the window. Not a sign of life or green anywhere outside yet, except for the evergreens. Winter or July and July isn’t here yet. Maybe in April. That’s been known to happen.

As I was dusting and changing clocks Saturday morning in my living room, I suddenly realized that there was a new fragrance in the room.

Sure enough, my jasmine officinale has begun to bloom. And as you can see from this crazy photo, (the jasmine blooms sandwiched between a couple of amaryllis leaves), there are just a few blossoms open.

Here’s the whole photo so that you can see how few blooms–and how many are yet to open.

Sometimes with very fragrant plants like this it’s best that the blooms only open a few at a time. Especially indoors, with no pollinators, and just me to enjoy this, small doses are best!

Yes, that is a canister vacuum. No, I am not suggesting that you vacuum your plants.

But I find that each week, as I clean up the house, I use either the wand on my vacuum, or just the hose, as shown here, to clean up around my plants.

Do I have that many messy plants? Oh yes!

This is just one example. This is my pittosporum tobira variegata. It’s a lovely plant and in mid-to-late spring for me it blooms with lovely small white flowers that have a wonderful fragrance.

But by this point in the season, it wants to be back outside. It’s a shrub. It really doesn’t want to be a houseplant, except that it’s not hardy in my region. So it gets finicky and starts dropping leaves. Sometimes a lot of leaves all over the place and on top of those other plants.

So once I clean the plants off (I repeat, I don’t vacuum plants–vacuums have too much suction for delicate leaves), I vacuum all the leaves up.

Then there’s my osmanthus fragrans–another plant that would be a shrub someplace else.

It’s a fairly good houseplant for me and it’s almost continually in bloom all winter with those tiny white flowers. They can perfume the whole room.

They can also make quite a mess of the windowsills, nearby plants, and anywhere else that they fall. But the vacuum keeps things neat and tidy with very little work.

Of course as you can see from the pittosporum photo, my plants are placed fairly close together so this technique is not for the faint of heart. If I am not careful, I can make more mess than I am trying to clean. But that hasn’t happened lately. I am becoming a pro at this technique.

After I lost my grandmother’s ficus, I was happy to find this sort of substitute. This is a benjaminii type but obviously it’s variegated. We’ll see how that works out.

Generally benjaminii types were known to be finicky. In fact, what used to happen when you moved the plant at all was that it would lose a good portion of its leaves. So far, I have brought this from a nice toasty greenhouse to my cool home, and then moved it within my home and it’s doing just fine–very little leaf loss. Maybe the breeders have somehow figured out a way to improve on these.

Yes, this looks just like the plant above but it’s a different plant, I promise. This is a ficus triangularus, and I can tell you that the breeders haven’t managed to improve much on this one!

Actually, I am not being fair. I got this in December so it has had to put up with nothing but low light and cold temperatures in my house since it arrived. It looks good but it has lost a decent number of leaves.

It has much thicker, leathery leaves than the benjaminii type.

I had been keeping both of these where they were getting light from my hydroponic garden. I just moved them into bright indirect light at the other end of the house.

With any luck, none of the plants in that area will turn out to have been infested with the scale from the discarded plants and all will be well. But I am going to have to maintain careful vigilance for quite some time, especially as it warms up. Generally, as the days grow longer and the sun gets stronger, all sorts of pests start to appear. I have learned that from years’ past.

This is how my 2022 ended–I said goodbye to a plant that had been with me since 1990, my grandmother’s ficus.

The fact that it went quickly was of some consolation, I suppose. But the 6 weeks or so that I watched it decline were still pretty painful.

This year is beginning with more parting with ficus. This past weekend I said goodbye to 2 ficus Audrey and a ficus lyrata that were too scale infested to save.

This is the bright spot. This little ficus elastica could be cleaned off.

Luckily February is a short month. I am hoping for better luck going forward.