Herself's Houseplants

I saw a request for which types of plants are good for dish gardens recently. First decide if you wish to do a dry desert type dish garden or a tropical garden. Traditional dish gardens do not have drainage in the container. I usually provide some in mine.

Here are some commonly used dish garden plants that have worked well for many.

Wet:
Carnivorous plants
African Violets
Pothos
Podocarpus
Pittosporum
Pepperomia
Syngonium
Bromeliad
Croton
Pteris fern
Creeping Fig
Neanthe Bella palm

Dry:
Jade
Crassula
Kalanchoe
Sedum
Pilosocereus
Haworthia
Aloe
Cleistocactus
Sansevieria
Echeveria
Lithops
Graptopetalum

But the best thing to do is visit a nursery or two, look for small plants with similar growing needs.

See also on this site:
Dish gardens in stainless steel bowls
More dish garden ideas, wire frame holders

Probably you can.

If you have some cool plants outside you’d like to grown indoors give it a try.

Plants that do best indoors are those that grow in shade or part shade outside. It is difficult to get a full sun outdoor plant all the light it needs indoors. Sometimes it will work anyhow.

So dig up a section or the whole plant if it is small and pot it up in regular potting soil or what ever it is growing in outside. Leave the plant outside for a few weeks, preferably in the same spot or conditions you found it. Let it adjust to the pot before you adjust it to being indoors.

When you bring the plant in, it will often shed a lot of leaves. The more sun the plant needs the more leaves it’ll likely shed. Some plants will adjust just fine after shedding by putting out less or smaller leaves.

If it is a tree or shrub or other large plant you’ll want to bonsai it for indoor growing. This is done just by letting it get pot bound after removing 1/3 of the roots. You may have to still repot it yearly just to give it fresh soil and trim the roots back a bit. These plants do best both pot bound and in shallow pots. They like to receive a good heavy watering but not be sitting in water and shallow pots work well for this.

Plants that like high humidity outdoors will want to be in terrariums or in bathrooms or kitchens where the water to air content is usually high.

But unless a plant is a protected species, dig it up and give it a try. Going through many old house plant books from the 1970s and also from Victorian times I saw many plants we only grow outside now that were popular house plants. Perhaps you’ll start the next cool house plant trend with your re-located plant.