While most of us love to be surrounded by flowers, keeping house plants alive is not always the easiest of tasks.
What blooms beautifully in one corner of your home, could suddenly go downhill when moved to another spot.
While houseplants can cheer up any dull corner of your space they can also help improve the air quality in your home by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide, increase oxygen, and help to remove toxins.
For those of us who are novices in the green thumb world we may want to start with something that doesn’t require much watering and is easy to keep alive.
Orchids are often the plant of choice to gift to others, but they have a reputation for being difficult to keep alive, and once the blooms have died off most of us give up on the idea they’ll bloom the following year.
But with a little know-how orchids are in fact one of the easiest plants to keep alive and with 30,000 different species to choose from, these plants are in abundance.
Perhaps the cutest of orchid species are these monkey orchids, which have the added bonus of giving off the aroma of ripe oranges. The combination of flower petals and stamens give this plant its unique appearance.
This particular species is not in abundance as they’re pretty rare, growing only in the tropical highland forests of Southeastern Ecuador.
Called the Dracula simia– which translates to “little dragon monkey” these very cute blooms thrive at altitudes around 6,561 feet (2,000 meters) and can also grow up to 2ft tall.
These beautiful plants, which bear an uncanny resemblance to our ancestral cousin, are pretty hardy with flowers that bloom during any season, at any time.
The little dragon monkey orchid was first discovered in 1978 by botanist Carlyle A. Lueren and they have become a sort of spectacle since then.
While they can bloom all year round it takes a lot of effort to grow these beauties as they require the opposite care of most plants – cool temperatures and low light.
If you do fancy the challenge then experts recommend growing them in moss instead of soil.
Thankfully the orchids we have in our homes are far more low maintenance just requiring an ice cube twice a week during growing season to prevent overwatering.
Place them on a bright windowsill facing east or west, feed them weekly with orchid fertilizer and repot them in fresh orchid mix when it stops blooming.
I’d feel like I was being watched if I was surrounded by these very cute plants.
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