Houseplants: What's Old Is New Again

My big break in horticulture was probably in the early 1970s, several years before I moved to Hampton Bays. I was living at my parents’ house on the North Shore and had taken over my sister’s bedroom, which was twice the size of mine. I started collecting plants. The original houseplant boom was in progress, and I wanted one of everything I could get as long as it was in a 4-inch pot.

Why just 4-inch pots? Well, plastic pots were just being introduced and most plants were being sold in clay pots. That made them heavy, and while you could find plants in 6- and 8-inch pots, these were expensive. But the process of injection molding of plastics was taking off at the same time, and quickly growers learned how to convert from clay-potted operations to plastic. That was the one thing that really started the houseplant boom. Cheap plastics also made it very profitable to put up plastic film greenhouses at a fraction of the cost of the older glass houses.

The second-floor bedroom, while being large, wasn’t really a great growing spot as there was limited natural light. However, you could buy inexpensive fluorescent grow lights or convert a double-tube shop light into a plant light. Add four saw horses, two 4-by-8-foot sheets of plywood and bingo: I had my own indoor greenhouse that was 4 feet wide and 16 feet long. The collection grew, the plants grew and my parents were not thrilled.

I was still (or again) in college and doing part-time landscaping to make some money. One of my wealthy client’s wives asked me what I thought about opening up a plant shop. They were the rage at the time, and Great Neck had four plant stores. Longtime Dutch and German growers in the center of the Island switched from clay pots to plastic ones and in just a matter of a couple of years it was hard to walk down a Manhattan street or Long Island village and not find a plant store within a block or two.

A few years later there was an energy crisis, and oil prices went through the ceiling as did petrochemical prices. Now these growers were hit with a double whammy. Expensive plastics meant expensive plastic pots and expensive oil and natural gas to heat those tropical greenhouses. The houseplant boom soon became a houseplant bust, and the flood of plants became a trickle.

Many of Long Island’s best growers moved south to Florida and North Carolina, where greenhouse operations were much less expensive. Houseplants were now trucked up from down south, and with cheap hydro power in Canada, we started seeing tropical plants come from Canadian growers. Then a hurricane hit Florida and wiped out most of the domestic production of tropicals, i.e. houseplants. Another quick boom-to-bust cycle.

All the while we still saw houseplants, known in the business as the “foliage trade,” available in big box stores, and their large contracts kept many growers in the business. The downside was that most of the houseplant stores closed, and even several greenhouse chains like Flowertime and Plant World closed up as the collapse of the larger houseplant market dwindled and sputtered, failing to grow.

You could still find tropical plants — aka houseplants — in places out here. Several garden centers on the East End maintained rooms or small greenhouses where they offered large to small houseplants, and Lynch’s (now Fowler’s) added two really nice greenhouse rooms to its retail store. The hottest plant book of the time was Alfred Byrd Graf’s “Exotic Plant Manual,” which you can still find used, and the larger epic simply called “Exotica,” which is 1,934 pages long with 12,000 plant illustrations and is also still available from used book dealers.

My business model had also changed a bit. After moving back to Long Island from Albany, I went back to college and for the first time I had my own car. Having helped build a couple of plant stores in Nassau County, I had all the wholesale connections. Once a week I would take my Toyota Corona to Keil’s greenhouses in Bohemia and fill it to the brim with hanging baskets and pots of tropicals, set up a table at the college’s student center and then, week after week, sell and sell out of houseplants.

I eventually graduated and moved out to the Hamptons. Two years later I found myself rebuilding and then running the Jacob’s greenhouse at what was then Southampton College, and I began growing and selling houseplants again. We’d sell out during the week that students returned from summer vacation, and then we would sell out again on parents weekend. The profits from the sales led to the complete renovation of the greenhouse.

A blink of the eye and it’s 2021. All of a sudden, my inbox is being filled with press releases and offers from PR firms to give me as much information and as many contacts as I might need to write about the “new houseplant revolution.” It seemed that history was about to repeat itself, and if you believed the press releases, there was a wonderful new world of houseplants just waiting for us at local stores. It was like the tropical boom of the 1970s and 1980s had never occurred, and houseplants were a whole new thing.

I looked at the press releases, I scanned proofs of a bunch of new books on houseplants so ya’ll could learn how to grow them. I went to greenhouses and garden centers looking for these new and easier-to-grow tropical plants, and what I came away with was just a big sigh.

Yes, I’d seen some plants that were not part of the tropical trade of the last half of the 20th century (as in the 1970s and 1980s) but they were few and far between. And while there was certainly a generation or two of you who missed the craze, the new one being touted seems to be more of a fizzle than a sizzle. And of course I’m reminded of Ecclesiastes 1:9 where, to paraphrase, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again, there is nothing new under the sun.” And that, my friends, may be the bottom line to the current trend in houseplants.

I do realize, however, that many of these plants may be new to you, while not to me. The foliage colors may be different, they may cost a lot more, but essentially they are pretty much the houseplants of our grandparents and parents. There are some you should certainly stay away from. There are others that can become great friends in your home, and we already know they can clean your home’s air and add humidity to dry winter interiors.

On the other side, I can’t count how many times readers have written to me looking for a home for a Ficus, Schefflera or Norfolk Island Pine — bought in a 1-gallon pot — that is now touching the ceiling and in desperate need of new accommodations. And no, I don’t want one, and no, I don’t know of anyone looking for a single-stemmed, 8-foot-tall corn plant (Dracaena fragrans).

Next week, more particulars, and I’ll share buying tips as well as growing tips so you can have your indoor garden and love it. In the meantime, garden centers are full of tropicals as the growers try to unload their stocks before winter and the garden centers try to clear them out so there’s room for the Poinsettias, holiday cacti and Christmas trees. Beware of corner stores, though, who suddenly are carrying houseplants. These are the stores that have tropicals set up on the sidewalk on fall mornings when it’s in the 30s. What don’t they get about the word “tropical”?

Also remember this warning: Just as there’s always room in the outdoor garden for one more plant, there’s always room inside for one more houseplant. Keep growing.