MAAS Nursery Exotic Plant Tour

Jennifer Gregory:

Hi, I’m Jennifer from MAAS, and we’re going to talk to you about some of our favorite exotics here at the nursery. And what makes something exotic? It’s desirable, hard to find, unique, and this is certainly something unique.

Now, this small plant here is a staghorn fern, and they’re what’s known as an epiphyte; they grow on the sides of trees and they digest decaying plant material, so we feed ours banana peels. Now, this guy doesn’t have it yet, but it will grow a specialized leaf called a platelet, which you can see on this 40-year-old specimen. Now, those platelets are how it adheres to the sides of trees in the wild. It’s not the fastest-growing plant in the world, but it is something really beautiful and unique that comes from Australia and New Zealand.

Another exotic we have are the tropical pitchers. They make an intriguing and interesting addition to your household plant collection. They’re very low fuss, they love heat and humidity. The only real requirement they have, aside from the bright, indirect light, is distilled or rainwater. They lure your household pests into these pitchers by emitting a pheromone that lures the pest inside. Once the insect is inside, they cannot get lift to fly back out, and are digested by enzymes within.

This fascinating specimen is known as a spiral cactus. It can get between four and six feet tall. It’s really best outdoors in the full sun, as it’s going to get too large and too heavy to really be an ideal houseplant. However, these beautifully brightly colored plants that look like you should taste the rainbow aren’t flavored, aren’t dyed, they produce these colors naturally. But they are two separate cacti. On top, we have what’s known as a moon cactus, and on bottom is a type of euphorbia. Eventually, this top part will get too large for the bottom graft that’s supplying the chlorophyll for the moon cactus to thrive and survive, so you will have to re-graft it after a point, but it’s very easy and very straightforward.

If you’re looking for something big, beautiful, and useful, consider the peace lily. In a 1972 study conducted by NASA, it was found that peace lilies remove all of the air pollutants that you would encounter here in the Houston area. If this is a bit much, because it is a large and in charge plant, we have a smaller variety over here. It still removes those same air pollutants, and it has a little bit of interest in the leaves, this is called variegation, but this is as big as this plant gets. If you’re committed to the bit, as far as large and interesting plants go, the bat flower has a large black bat-like flower, and requires the same care as the peace lily does, which is to say, not much.

Not all exotics do require a high level of care. Don’t be scared and intimidated by something coming from far away, being interesting, or unusual. If you just know what it wants, you’ll get there.