Large plants for the floor

A large plant is not a bigger version of a small one. It is a different commitment: it takes a patch of floor, a heavy pot and a place within reach of a window, and it cannot be lifted onto a sill to recover when it sulks. The entries on this page are recorded at 120cm or more, which puts them above anything that fits on a shelf, and every one of them is a plant that stands on the floor.

Settle the light before the pot, the price or the leaf. The plant in the shop was raised in a greenhouse, and nothing about it will tell you how it will do in your hallway. Work out which window the plant can stand beside, which side of the house it faces and how many metres back it will sit. A fiddle leaf fig in a dim corner is not a plant that needs more care. It is a plant in the wrong room, and no amount of attention fixes that. The guide to light, room by room shows how to measure what a corner really gets.

The mistake that kills them

Watering a large pot as though it were a small one. The top few centimetres of a pot twenty five centimetres across dry out long before the root ball does, so a finger pushed in to the first knuckle says yes while the middle of the pot is still wet. Go deeper, and for a plant too heavy to lift, tip the pot towards you an inch and feel the weight come onto your hand. A big plant in dry compost is startlingly light. The guide to telling whether a plant needs water covers both.

A decorative pot with no drainage hole is the other quiet killer on a floor. It is a reservoir with a plant balanced on top, and nobody can see what is at the bottom. Keep the plant in its nursery pot inside the decorative one and lift it out to water. Put a saucer under anything that stands on a wooden floor, and empty it within half an hour.

Repotting is the third. A plant that has grown taller does not need a bigger pot, and one that is unhappy for reasons you cannot place does not either. The guide to repotting lists the four signs that matter, and they are all about roots.

How the list was chosen

An entry is listed when its recorded height is 120cm or more, when the plant can live indoors, and when it is filed under at least one room of the house. Climbers and trailers are left out, because they want a pole or a high shelf more than a floor, and so are the vegetables and herbs of the kitchen garden. The list is sorted with the easiest first, then by name.

The statement plants shelf is chosen differently. It picks plants for their presence, whatever their size, while this one picks by height alone. Wipe the leaves with a damp cloth every month or two, because a big leaf collects a film of dust that takes a real fraction of the light, and turn the pot a quarter turn each week so the plant does not lean.