The ladies and Varanus are correct. Be warned though, the green thumbs have to be earned by learning. They don’t come naturally.
The only real issue with live plants is the increased humidity. All plants require some form of water reservoir and all plants transpire = give off water through their leaves, some more than others. Reduced lighting does reduce transpiration. If your reptile comes from wet sclerophyll or rainforest, this won’t be an issue. If it is from dry sclerophyll forest or even closed woodland you can compensate by increasing the ventilation. However once you start looking at the open woodland , mallee and other semi-arid to arid habitats, you need a different set of plants to use.
For moist area herps, a few hardy plants to consider as a beginner are a vine called Pothos, Scindapsus or Devil’s Ivy (Epipremnum aureum), Happy Plant (Aglaonema), Fruit Salad Plant (Monstera deliciosa), Cast Iron Plant (Aspidistra elatior), Dwarf Umbrella Tree (Schefflera arboricola), Peace Lily (Spathyphyllum), Palour Palm (Chamaedorea elegans), Kentia Palm (Howea forrestiana), Spider Plant (Chlorophytum comosum) and one of my favs, Philodendron species – come in lots of shapes and sizes and if you’ve got tree frogs - you can plonk a bare-rooted cutting in the water at the bottom of an enclosure, a bit of aquarium gravel to hold it in place and the frogs will sit out on the broad green leaves where you can see them and appreciate them and they’ll love you for it. There are lots more, like various orchids, the Sydney Rock Orchid (Dendrobium speciosum) would do well and some beautiful Bromeliad species, but these plants require a very different mix in which to grow. Be aware that a lot of bromeliads have spiny saw-like edges to their leaves.
There is a whole range of thornless cacti-like succulents that will fit the bill nicely as they give off very little water. Aeonium, Agave, Aloe, Crassula, Echeveria, Gasteria, Haworthia, Kalanchoe, Sansevieria, Sempervivum are plant genera of these ones I have growing at home at the moment and would be suitable. They can be propagated by breaking off a leaf at the base and it putting into moist perlite or vermiculite or a mixture of both in a plant pot. Then just water once or twice a week depending on rthe weather. Don’t select species that the leaves fall of when bumped – go for the more robust ones. This is why I have omitted Senecio and Sempivirens from the list.
The down side of these plants is that they do need bright light.
The commonest mistake that beginners make with indoor plants is that they over water them and rot the roots, killing the plant. The identical same plant in a shade house that gets watered 3 times a week may need watering every 3 weeks indoors and even less in an enclosure. It seems to be based on the notion that indoors is very dry indoors and will therefore strip the plant of moisture quicker. Plants only open the pores in their leaves to let in CO2 so they can photosynthesis (make their own food). The downside is that they automatically start to lose water through the open pores, the same way our mouth dries out if we keep it open long enough. The pores are microscopic but there’s hundreds of thousands of them. Any movement of air around the leaves will strip any built up moisture away from the leaves and maintain a high rate of water loss. It is rare to have totally still air outside. If you walk inside on a sunny summer’s day, even with fluorescent lights on, it takes a while for your eyes to adjust so that you can see. Because our eyes compensate, we often fail to appreciate the real difference in light intensity between indoors and out. Plants are not given to perform a lot of photosynthesis under such conditions. The temperature difference between a plant outside in summer and a plant inside has a significant effect on the rate of water vapour movement. Another contributing factor to the demise of indoor plants is that we tend to put them in deep saucers or pots with a water reservoir below so they don’t spill water. Whereas the pot outside has the opportunity to completely drain any excess unimpeded.
What to do?
First off, make sure your plant is in a decent premium potting mix. Some of the chain stores use ridiculous mixes that drain rapidly and retain little moisture, so they can be watered every day. You can tell if your mix is retaining moisture by the weight after watering compared to before.
How do I know if my pots need water? Get used to their weight and you tell by simply picking them up. Add only what you think is needed. Eventually you’ll pick up other signs, like a softening of the leaves as they start to go flaccid or you’ll notice them start to lose their gloss. A scratch around in the top few cm of mix can be elucidating as well.
Where possible, try to let your plant drain fully before putting it back.
Nevertheless, it is helpful to have some sort of watering regime. With the cooler temperatures and reduced light intensity of winter plants are doing a lot of photosynthesising and most water lost is via evaporation from the mix. So I used to work on once every 2 week at the very height of summer (February here) to once every 2 months in over winter – approximately, still checking not to overwater.
If you have a shade house or sheltered verandah and rotate like he ladies suggest, much of the above can be circumvented.
Put some cocofibre around the top to cover the soil, which should at least 2cm lower that height of pot and add some decorative medium sized pebbles or gravel, will keep the inmates out of the potting mix yet still allow watering. If you are incorporating a plant into a landscaped effect, you can hide the pots a number of ways. A piece of hollow limb used like a sleeve over the pot, paperbark wrapped around the pot with the grain vertical and stapled or glued at the back. Place plant in a squat pot. Use a container without bottom holes e.g. cut-down yoghurt tub, to insert to full depth in substrate and squat pot sits hidden inside & easy to remove and rotate.
Best lights to use are the aquarium lights from pet shops. They are designed to grow aquatic plants, which have exactly the same light needs as terrestrial plants. Green plants cannot use green light for photosynthesis, so they reflect it back out, at the same time absorbing those colours on the red side and those on the blue. So these lights have an extra boost in the red and blue areas of the spectrum. I have personally found that a large pet / produce chain group here sell them at the same price as the lighting distributor.
… sorry about the length – the product of yet another sleepless night, 48 hrs and still counting…
Blue
