I love keeping plants in my room. I have a horrible history with killing plants, but I love to keep them nonetheless.
That said, today I decided to share the plants that I own that call my room home.
My main plant
This is a close-up shot of my plant, Dennis. Dennis was a plant I received for free on my first day here at OSU. There was a large activities fair (probably the most people in one area I've ever seen in my life) and everyone had a plant sticking out of the drawstring bags they had gotten for free. My roommate and I asked many people where they got their plants from, and eventually we ended up signing a paper for some catholic study group (neither of us are catholic) in exchange for two plants. The plants then went on a journey from the plastic containers they came in, to cut up coffee cups I recycled into pots, to the actual pots we got for a dollar a piece at a grocery store.
You can see in this picture the newest leaf Dennis has been working on forming for a week or two. As you can see, my little plant is thriving on my windowsill. My roommates plant, originally named Bender because when we got it it bent at a 90 degree angle at the base, but now named Hubbard after an Ohio State football player and the company whos name is on the disposable coffee cups here, is not doing so well.
Hubbard
Hubbard is the one in the middle with the sickly looking leaves. It was doing very well, often better than its neighbor Dennis, but over winter break it was a little bit underwatered. Now it seems to be stuck in some state of looking sick but not getting any better or worse.
Holy's Plant
The plant on the left is a sort of rescue plant. One day a girl down the hall was asking if anyone wanted to take her plant off her hands. Being the courteous young men we are, my roommate and I agreed to take it. It had been growing in a red solo cup with no holes in the bottom to drain excess water. It reeked of decay, and we thought it was dead for a while. Just in case, however, we put it in a new cup with holes in the bottom for drainage and watered it less frequently on a regular basis. It lost all of its old leaves and sprouted three new ones. This plant was never given a name for some reason, but it is thriving just like Dennis now.
Henriko
This is my cactus Henriko. I don't think Henriko is a real name, but for my purposes it is. Henriko was a gift from my girlfriend that I received after my old cactus, also named Henriko, died suddenly (This is what I was talking about earlier when I said I was bad with plants. I literally killed a cactus, the plant designed to withstand some of the harshest climate in the world.). As pictured above, Henriko is a hybrid of sorts. I don't know much about the plants I keep, but my friend that used to work in a flower shop told me that my cactus is actually two cactuses in a symbiotic relationship. She informed me that one half of the cactus can not photosynthesize, so it relies on the other half for all of its food and energy needs. I do not know how true this is, but it sounds plausible to me. In the picture I chose for this post, Henriko is a bit snowy. We never had any issues in the past with snow or rain being blown into our room through the open window, so we tended to leave it open all the time. That is, until one day when I came home to find half of my black futon had turned white with snow and my cactus was attempting to mimic a Christmas tree.
I do not know what species any of these plants belong to, or even what part of the world they originated in. I do know that they look nice on my windowsill, but if anyone has any information on these plants that they can tell me just by looking at them, I would be happy to learn a little something about them, so let me know in a comment if you notice or think of anything.