Houseplant rodeo last night: watered everybody, flushed all hanging baskets and soaked for >1hr, re-potted
seventeen plants (about half of them!), re-painted four flowerpots, dealt with three dead plants and two that were beyond salvation, spruced up a flagging
Aralia, and moved a pothos in a vase of water to a pretty vase of water that actually goes with my stuff.
Front porch, too: swept; cleaned the mat; removed empty pots, dead hanging baskets (oops, should probably water those once in a while), and junky old wood that used to be decorative and now is just old and gross looking; put out new containers, painted to match (tall thin terra cotta painted in a grayish-blackish thing to kind of resemble
florist's buckets) and filled them with
Sansiviera.
The front door is black, as of last weekend. Here's what's in my head:
(stock magazine picture I've seen several times over the past ten years)Obviously, my front porch is not this big. I have no slate tile, and my house is beige instead of white. But my front garden is populated by similar colors: lots of purple and black foliage, purple flowers, couple of pink flowers as lighter accents. I really want to make the (
Sansiviera) container plantings around the front door a) match the front garden and b) look more like this picture; problem is, my front porch gets NO direct sunlight at all, and very little indirect light, early in the morning. I was thinking of using big, fluffy
hostas as a fill/footer - and in the hanging baskets that I keep killing - and probably some of the Persian Shield, Coleus, and purple Oxalis from my garden. I have some of each growing nearby in very similar light conditions, and they do just fine.

I reeeeally want some of those big, pointy, green and purple things in the picture, though. I'm not sure what they are - could be Alocasia or Colocasia; I think it's the first one (uh-oh: water requirements issues in a mixed planter). I also want some of that purple Wandering Jew for the hanging baskets, but hell if I'm paying for it - that stuff grows practically wild all over the place, I'm sure I could find a safe (legal) place to take a cutting from a public area (not someone's yard).
My front garden is in need of a major overhaul this Fall. Hm.
So, the only houseplant that didn't get any attention that needed it (other than watering) is my gigantico
Bird of Paradise, which desperatly needs to be re-potted: at the moment, it's still in the nursery can, which sits inside the planter it's supposed to live in, and it's about damned time it had room to spread out. Hard to do that on the kitchen counter, though, like I do with the smaller plants. Gonna have to haul that one outside. It needs big work, though: it's got ants, the scale I got rid of a month ago is starting to come back, and it needs pruning. So: Saturday. Among other things.
ETA: Aha!
Colocasia!
.