The genus Sansevieria had never really spoken to the botanist Chad Husby, until it did — loudly.
But not in the way it usually ingratiates itself to potential adopters, who hear that the most familiar one of all, the snake plant (Sansevieria trifasciata), with its vertical, swordlike succulent foliage, is indestructible, maybe the lowest-care of low-care houseplants.
Dr. Husby, chief explorer for Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Fla., heard Sansevieria’s call in 2019, during an International Palm Society meeting in the San Diego area. At a tour of a member’s garden, another attendee commented on a handsome, silvery Sansevieria growing there. The host gifted the man and Dr. Husby each a cutting of the rare plant, which looked nothing like the image of the genus he held in his mind.
The horticulture industry’s emphasis on the generic snake plant, he said, “leads people to totally misjudge the genus — which happened to me for most of my life as well.”
But no more. That silvery specimen catalyzed in him the same curiosity and craving that it has in recent years in keen houseplant collectors, sending them scouring specialty catalogs and Etsy listings for species and cultivars that are anything but generic looking.
Even within the species S. trifasciata there is variation. Beyond the upright, linear-leaved types, others of medium stature display wider foliage; the smallest form ground-hugging rosettes.
Elsewhere in the genus, these sculptural plants range from distinctly vertical, achieving shrublike stature, to low, nest-like mounds of foliage. Leaves may be flat or wavy or even cylindrical and shaped like tusks, arranged in a configuration like a fan, or maybe a pineapple top or the most emphatic of cockatoo’s crests. Some are near-alabaster or silvery, others the darkest of greens, and there are variegated choices, striped or mottled in gold or white or silver. A few, like S. hallii Pink Bat, are even tinged with pink.
It wasn’t long after that San Diego event that Dr. Husby began visiting other collectors and acquiring plants, focusing on unusual types. Then in 2021, things got serious. He and a colleague flew west and filled a rental truck with specimens from the botanical gardens at the Huntington near Pasadena, and from two stops in Tucson: the personal collection of Alan Myklebust, an officer of the International Sansevieria Society, and Arid Lands Greenhouses nursery. They drove their haul back to Fairchild.
The 83-acre botanic garden and scientific research institution, which specializes in the conservation of rare tropical plants, had a mere handful of Sansevieria before that. Now, not in pots as houseplants but growing in the ground on prominent public display, there are more than 200 accessions representing 46 species.
Roots in Africa
South Florida is the one place in the continental United States that virtually all of these roughly Zone 10-hardy plants are happy outdoors year-round, Dr. Husby said, though certain species are adapted to conditions in the Los Angeles basin and parts of Arizona.
But most of us know them as houseplants, and according to a 1982 University of Florida research paper, Sansevieria has been grown in commercial nurseries in the state to supply the houseplant trade since at least the 1920s.
Unlike other plant groups he’d worked with, where a collection grew after a series of plant-hunting expeditions in the wild, this was different for Dr. Husby.
He didn’t go botanizing in Sansevieria’s native range, which “is really concentrated in East Africa,” he said. “Basically from Somalia down through Mozambique is really the main concentration of diversity.” Some species occur in western Africa, including S. trifasciata, or in southern Africa (S. hallii); a few outliers hail from the Arabian Peninsula and even into Myanmar.
He didn’t have to look that far.
“To see that the Sansevieria world already had all this incredible diversity in the hobbyist world was really exciting,” Dr. Husby said. A lot just bore a variety name, or a number; what species they fit into hadn’t been sorted out.
On the topic of taxonomy, most Sansevieria have been moved lately into the genus Dracaena, based on recent DNA analysis, with the Sansevieria name now considered an older synonym. Whichever name you adhere to, these are succulent members of the Asparagus family (Asparagaceae), which might make sense if you saw the white flowers around January that are more common on outdoor plants than houseplants, followed by orange seed-filled berries.
Dr. Husby and the International Sansevieria Society he is a board member of are of one mind. “Because it is such a distinctive group for horticulture,” he said, “I think I prefer to stick with the old name. It does denote some special characteristics that are really relevant to us as horticulturists.”
One example: Sansevierias can be propagated from leaf cuttings — like that silvery piece he carried home in his suitcase from San Diego. “As far as I can tell,” he said, “that is unique to Sansevierias and not the other Dracaenas, which don’t seem to allow that.”
A cross-section cut from a leaf will root and send up new growth in time, as long as its polarity is observed — as in right side up. The end of each piece that was originally closer to the root is what gets stuck into the growing medium. Before it does, let the cuttings sit out for a day or two, so the cut edges callus.
Sansevierias also have another difference: They grow from rhizomes, “these creeping underground stems,” Dr. Husby said. “I don’t know of any Dracaena that does that.”
The enthusiastic rhizomes allow an even easier method of propagation — simple division. For variegated types, that’s actually the preferred way, since rooted cuttings often send up new shoots that are just plain green.
Care and Feeding
What most people know about the classic snake plant is that reputation for withstanding neglect. (Why Aspidistra, and not Sansevieria, laid claim to the common name cast iron plant is puzzling.)
“It is a little hard to write about the cultural requirements of Sansevierias since they hardly have any,” Hermine Stover wrote in 1983 in “The Sansevieria Book,” reinforcing the neglect-proof stereotype.
There are better reasons to adopt one — and better care regimens than treating it like a nonliving item of décor. It will live through being relegated to a dark corner and watered infrequently, but mere survival is not a sign it is thriving; it’s just dying more slowly than most foliage houseplants would in the same abusive conditions.
One other note: If your S. trifasciata got extra-tall, that may not be a victory, either, but simply that it has stretched upward, or etiolated, searching for more light.
“They do appreciate as much light as you can give them, especially filtered light,” Dr. Husby said, which will prompt these generally slow growers to accelerate.
He recommends providing a well-draining soil, to which he adds slow-release fertilizer. Moderate watering may suffice in cooler, lower-light months; they dislike the combination of cool and wet. But in warm, bright conditions — such as when potted plants summer outdoors — Sansevieria want frequent watering.
Eighty-nine species were cited in the 2022 reference “The Genus Sansevieria: A Pictorial Guide to the Species” by Robert H. Webb, owner of Arid Lands, and Leonard E. Newton. “I think we’re probably nearing 100 species by now,” said Dr. Husby. The list of cultivars is even longer.
Maybe Dr. Husby’s favorite cultivar is Chanin, a hybrid from a Thai breeder with distinctive “short leaves that form an elegant spiral, rigidly arranged,” he said. The wavy foliage of another Thai hybrid, Dancing Dragon, also warrants attention.
“These are ones, if you grow them in lower light, they get greener,” he said. “But if you put them out in full sun, they get that full almost alabaster color.”
Another showy Thai hybrid to be on the lookout for is Iceman, with random narrow green lines contrasting against its thick, silvery leaves.
Various species have cylindrical foliage, including S. cylindrica, home to the popular cultivar Boncel, sometimes called the starfish Sansevieria.
Sansevieria stuckyi, the elephant tusk Sansevieria, with its very vertical foliage, is another exceptional cylindrical choice, Dr. Husby said; its leaves can get six feet tall or more, and a couple of inches thick. S. powellii can achieve similar height, its foliage arranged in fan-like fashion around a prominent vertical stem.
Different cultivars of S. masoniana, the well-named whale-fin Sansevieria for the ample shape of each leaf, may be marked with exceptional yellow striping, or thick vertical bands of white, or mottled in silvery patterns.
So which will it be? Will your own collection focus on extremes of leaf color, perhaps, or a diversity of shapes, or variations of cylindrical foliage?
You’ve seen one Sansevieria, you haven’t seen them all.
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