Flamingo Plant for Your Home

By Jos Van Hage

A beautiful indoor houseplant is the Anthurium commonly known as the ‘Flamingo Flower’. It is a popular houseplant because of its good looks, long lasting flowers and easy care. The heart shaped flowers are actually colored bracts and the flowers are on the tail or spadix that rises above the bract. If in the right conditions, the plant will produce flowers for most of the year. When on the plant the flowers can last for up to eight weeks and as cut flowers they are also long lasting. The green thick, waxy leaves are also an attractive part of the plant.

There are many different types of Anthurium but the ‘scherzerlanum’ is best suited as an indoor house plant because of its small size and slow growth. Although they can survive in lower lit areas they do best and flower more if they are placed in a well lit area of the home during the winter and in a west or filtered southern location in the summer. You want to keep the plant out of direct hot sun and also away from drafts and dry air as this can scorch the foliage.

 Anthuriums prefer average room temperatures of 22-30 Celsius and as with many other plants they like a high humidity. The plant likes to be kept evenly moist, however if it does go too dry it will recover. It is a low maintenance plant and only needs to be transplanted every couple of years. In the spring you can remove the tiny little plantlets that shoot out from the side of the plant and re-plant them into individual pots.

A neat way to grow an anthurium is in a clear water filled vase without any soil. To do this you need to take the plant out of the dirt filled pot and wash all the dirt off the roots. Then place the plant on top of the water filled vase so that the crown of the plant is above the water level and the roots are dangling down into the water.

To really add interest to this you can put a Beta fish in the water! It will enjoy swimming around the plants roots.

-Jos

Jos Van Hage  owns and operates two Art Knapp garden centres in the Prince George area:

• Highway 16 west at Kimball Road
• Highway 97 North at Northwood Pulpmill Road.

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