Do You Have a Perpetually Sickly Plant?

Many people don’t know this, but garden writers are often tasked with setting up, styling and photographing or having photographed those lucky plants that end up pictured in their books. When I wrote my book Indoor Gardening the Organic Way a few years ago, I had most of the plants I wanted to photograph for the book already in my indoor garden, but there were a handful I had to buy. One plant, a fiddle leaf fig (Ficus lyrata), was given to me, because it was sickly.

“I don’t know if this one is going to make it,” said the florist from whom I bought the plants. “It’s a little puny, so you don’t have to pay for it.”

Today that once puny plant is more than 4 feet tall, and though it looks generally healthy, whatever abuse it experienced early on still haunts the plant at times. Though it’s given the same treatment as the rest of my garden, it starts to look under the weather sometimes and drops perfectly healthy leaves randomly. I respond by giving it a good pep talk, and after a couple of weeks it seems healthy once again.

The moral of the story is, don’t give up on your houseplants, even if they have a chronic condition! As I’ve mentioned in prior posts, houseplants are like people. If they have a bad childhood experience—for instance aren’t watered properly or given enough light when they’re young, they can succumb to pests and diseases, which may be treated with chemical pesticides by growers. This harsh treatment can cause the plants to be plagued by ill health of varying degrees indefinitely.

Find out what your plant needs—be it reassurance, organic fertilizer or a change in lighting, and you’ll soon be looking at a happy plant once again.