garden

Fort Lauderdale landscape designer Luis
Llenza puts sansevierias through their paces,
using them for a wide range of landscape
needs, from groundcovers to edging to focal
points. Opposite: Low-growing 'Futura Simplex'
around a contemporary fountain, backed by
tall S. thfasciata. Below: Snake plants are
also ideal textural foils for other plants, like
the dramatic swords of laurentii Compacta'
(sometimes called 'Black Gold Extreme 1 )
woven among feathery muhly grass. Right: A
heavily white-striped cultivar called
'Bantel's Sensation'.
There is even an International Sansevieria Society, with members
from some 37 countries. Alan Butler, chairman of the society
and a partner at Brookside Nursery, which specializes in sansevierias
and other succulents, says the surge in sansevieria
popularity is based on converging trends in architectural and succulent
plants, and plants with low water needs, "which benefits the
pocket as well as ecology." For Bill Boyd, owner of Boyd Nurseries
in Loxahatchee, Florida, the big draw is their ease of culture, and
he calls them a "guilt-free plant," citing that many gardeners feel
like they've failed when a plant dies. The "sense of satisfaction
and success" with sansevierias is essentially a given.
Though sansevierias are the most undemanding of plants,
surviving isn't the same as thriving, and if you want them to
be in their prime, there are a few factors to keep in mind. Good
drainage is paramount — these are plants that evolved in hot,
dry locations. Butler says to water them very infrequently in winter
and regularly in summer, but the drainage needs to be near
perfect; overwatering is one of the only ways to kill a sansevieria
(also, never watering it). And they don't like extended periods
of cold, so in Zone 9 and warmer they can grow outdoors, but
cooler than that and they're houseplants. While they can endure
low-light conditions, they prefer bright, indirect light. Some can
take full sun, with the risk that they can acquire a burned look.
And though seemingly content to be pot-bound, their thick rhizomes
can eventually bust through a container; fortunately
dividing them is as easy as growing them.
While their name is distinctly Old World (from Count Pietro
Antonio Sanseverino, an 18th-century patron of horticulture in
Naples), sansevierias are not only thoroughly modern, they're
space age, having been named one of the best plants for cleansing
indoor air of toxins in a NASA study — you might even see
them tucked into a corner on a space station some day. After 200
years of cultivation, their persistence has paid off, like the tortoise
in Aesop's "The Tortoise and the Hare." Emerging from dark
hallways and country porches, they've hit the catwalk, r
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