A sunroom is an ideal place for plants to thrive. If you are a writer lost in your imagination one fine morning sipping coffee in your sunroom, how easy it is to watch a spider spinning a web in the morning sunlight, the sun glittering off the silky threads. You take in the other spider in the room, the flowering spider plant which is one of the eight plants that thrive in a sunroom.
- Hibiscus
- Orchids
- Passion Flower
- Boston Ferns
- Spider Plants
- Begonias
- African Violets
- Peace Lily
Your eyes get heavy, and you dream that the spider plant is moving slowly about the room. First extending an arm or inflorescence, a group or cluster of flowers on a green and white branch. As the inflorescence lengthens, flowers arrange themselves on the end or peduncle.
The weight pulls the branch down until it touches the ground. The branch takes root and grows into another spider plant which extends an arm, and the process begins again. I it farfetched to think that the plant traveled all the way from southern Africa this way. Slowly marching off and moving about the sunroom.
It’s just a dream that would take years to actually move around the room. But, you can see how easy it is to grow in a sunroom. It doesn’t take a green-thumbed gardener to successfully grow a spider plant.
Spider plants can also be named airplane plant, St. Bernard’s lily, spider ivy, or ribbon plant and grow very well inside a sunroom or outside. If you grow spider plants outside, you want to avoid extremes. Spider plants can tolerate temperatures as low as 35 °F but grow best between 65 °F and 90 °F.
Some folks are concerned about out-gassing from objects in a house. Formaldehyde gas can come from the glues in some furniture and carpets. Scientists have discovered that Spider plants reduce indoor air pollution in the form of formaldehyde. They believe approximately 70 plants would neutralize the formaldehyde released in a 1,700 sq ft energy-efficient house.
I’m not a huge spider fan. I recognize the contribution of spiders. We would be overrun by insects if it weren’t for spiders. Giving me the shakes though are areas of the world where spiders and their webs blow in on breezes and cover everything in tents of baby spiders. I read somewhere recently that spiders eat twice as much animal prey as humans do in a year, devouring up to 800 million tons, making them some of the world’s most voracious predators. Consider this: If all the humans stepped on a scale at one time, the total would be 316 million tons. Just an appetizer!
That will never happen with spider plants. Their little white flowers can be enjoyed with no fear of attack as you awake from a dream on your chaise lounge or wicker sofa. The little spider has completed his web, your coffee is cold, but you have one terrific idea for a short story.