My Favorite Houseplants | unique plants

My top plants of the year! Just sharing my favorite houseplants this year. I had a lot of fun in the past exploring different kinds of plants and getting out of my “aroid” box.

[ my links ]
shop: https://www.benjiplant.com/
patreon: https://www.patreon.com/benjiplant
instagram: @benji_plant
tiktok: @benjiplant
business inquiries: benjiplantcontact@gmail.com

[ discounts & links ]
soltech grow lights: benji15 for 15% off https://soltech.com/

[Music] hello so today we are talking about my favorite house plans of 20123 I feel like this year has been a year where I’ve branched outside of the plants that I normally gravitate towards so before throughout my plant Journey I’ve mostly focused on AIDS so like monstera and filad dendrin but recently I’ve been trying out different plants and I have some new and exciting ones to share with you so first up is my near vilia Java Plum it’s potted in this beautiful handmade ceramic that I got from Japan topped with moss as a top dressing I just really love the color and the shape of the plant and also how it looks with the pot and the Moss I think all of it just like looks so good together at the beginning of my plant journey I did not care about burm milads at all like I would see the ones in plant stores and they have that like shiny foliage that’s also super saturated in color it just wasn’t of interest to me and I thought that’s what all burm ads were but I recently learned that bermad are a family so the family’s bmia it’s super easy to care for um it looks very unique compared to other kinds of house plants it has a very nice structure to it it also holds water in this tank that it has at the top and it’s able to retrieve nutrients and water through the tank it’s pretty cool as I was saying the Brad family has a ton of different Genera that falls within it and this is one of them it’s a duronia brevifolia this isn’t on my list but I just wanted to show you the different kinds of broads that are out there um because I just learned recently that broads like are so diverse um this is also another one this is a diaa yeah I need to pot it up but it’s pretty cool right also tanas which are airplants they’re also Brads and also pineapples are Brads and then there’s this other genus called henia that I really like um those are very nice looking so yeah if if you haven’t thought of getting a bmad maybe look into the different kinds that are out there um there’s a lot to explore and then my next favorite house plant is this Ficus umala but I’m actually grouping all of my bent FAS in this category it’s too large so I can’t show it to you in this Frame but I’ll include some shots of it um let’s move this out of the way so I’ve been trying this bent Ficus method with my Ficus umala and my Ficus Elastica so what you do is you tie a piece of twine or piece of string to like the tip and then you pull it down and you bend it and then you tie it back onto itself to create a bend and then you have to keep it there for like 6 months I’m probably going to do a video that goes more in depth about it so my figus umela doesn’t look great right now but I think come springtime is going to look really good because that’s when you end up cutting off all of the leaves and then you put it outside in the sun to get full sun and that encourages branching and also um it puts out smaller leaves when it’s grown in more sunlight right now my Fus umela has some of these really big leaves and that’s because this was grown in the shade and um I recently moved it to a south facing window where it’s getting direct sunlight and it’s putting out smaller leaves which is actually kind of interesting the smaller leaves gives it more of a tree likee appearance um because like the ratio of size between the trunk and the leaves and then also once it branches I think it’s going to look really good and yeah I can’t wait for it to grow out this has been a long process so that’s why it’s one of my favorites because um I’ve just been working on it for a while so I’m trying this with a couple of the other FAS that I have so I’ll keep you all updated with the results but yeah I just really love how this looks I’ll include some photos of other bent FAS that I think are so beautiful it’s cool how you can take a more basic house plant and turn it into something special by like bending it making it unique you know my next favorite house plant is actually a moss so this is lucum glum also called cushion Moss the way that I’ve been using this Moss is actually as a top dressing for my plants um if you’ve been following me you know that I like to add top dressings to my plants because it just makes them look a little bit more clean and put together so usually I would use some type of gravel or small rocks but I wanted to use Moss uh most people when they do top dressing with moss they’ll use dried sheet Moss but I don’t really think it looks that good personally and the color ends up fading over time so I’ve been trying out this Moss as a top dressing and it’s been very successful so far this has been going on for 4 months and it looks pretty good still very vibrant and I see some new growth coming out I never thought that this would be possible because of how dry our climate is in Southern California I’ve been misting it every day and that keeps it like very fresh looking and green but there have been times when I haven’t missed at it because I’ve was like out of town so I think the longest I went was maybe 5 days and I didn’t mist or water the Moss at all and when I came back the Moss was like really silvery and it didn’t it was like dried out essentially but after I watered it again it completely greened up and was alive again so yeah this Moss is very resilient and I love it as a top dressing the other day I made a moss Cube so instead of like a Coca alond Moss ball I made it into a cube shape and I thought that would just be like a fun interesting thing because everyone’s so used to Moss ball why not Moss Cube I’m actually in contact with a sustainable Moss farming company um to have this Moss available to sell to you guys on my shop so that’s in the works and once that comes along more I’ll keep you updated next on the list is my platic serium fun Shiki I actually have two platic serums that I’m going to talk about because I wasn’t able to choose just one um but this guy has been growing so so well for me look at that can’t even really include it in the frame cuz it’s so big yeah I just really love this plant partially because I got it when it was so small and now it’s grown to be this massive thing um so what’s super cool about this plant is that it has these curved fertile frons that like curl in on itself when it gets even more mature it’s going to look so pretty because the curling gets more intense so when you go to a nursery the most common sacon Fern that you see is going to be a platan bif for cotum at least in the United States that is the most common one that I see um and if you don’t really like that one check out other species or cultivars or hybrids because there are a ton out there there’s a lot of more interesting ones I mean I like the bif for cotum but um if you want something that’s kind of more unique like the one I’ll show you then you can check out like eBay and Etsy it’s not as easy to get these because the only people that are really selling these plants are probably going to be private Growers um or collectors so the next one is my platic serium omo polar bear so before I just thought that omo was a cute name for a plant but I recently learned that omo is I think it’s a Thai detergent like a white detergent they call it omo because of these white fronds do you see how white they are so these are called triols and you don’t want to touch the plant because then um you’ll wipe these off and they don’t grow back but yeah this one is so Co cool I also got it when it was Tiny and it’s looking so good now so cute oh and then I also recently got this mount in my last video I showed it and um I mounted this plant and I think it looks super cool with like the stainless steel with the super white fuzzy foliage yeah I love these guys they’re like my babies I’ve had them for over a year and I got them as babies so next up is my Bonia gooes I didn’t expect to have a Ona on my list but I just love everything about this plant uh first off I really love the color of it it’s like this deep green and then when the leaves first emerge they are this red color I also really like the vation on the plant um that’s beautiful and then also the shape of the leaves is really pretty it’s like a circle but then at the bottom it creates a point my other thing that I love about it is it’s not just like a perfect circle the edges of the plant are like serrated and they have texture to them I also just love the arrangement I think the pot complement the plant really well in terms of shape and color and I also have some live moss growing on the top I also think that there’s a spider in here because I keep removing the spider webs in here and then they keep coming back but I can never find a spider so it’s okay it’s like it’s a little house that’s fine next step is not a specific plant instead it’s just like a type typ of display I’ve been doing so I’m really into using rocks and creating like a landscape stage with the plants um so this is an example of one that I did in a kind of recent video so this is a b but um yeah it just creates something very unique when you add rocks and create a landscape in your pot so I did it with this plant and then I also did it with this like haworthia here’s the haworthia terrarium looks super cool at first I didn’t like it but it’s it’s really growing on me now I want to explore this more in 2024 there are some accounts that are a huge inspiration to me I’ll put some pictures up and yeah that is something I want to try out more this year so a little tip for if you’re trying to do something like this if you’re using multiple Stones get different sizes and when you’re setting up the arrangement um make sure that you bury like 1/3 of the rock within the top dressing or within the substrate that that way it looks more natural and it doesn’t look like you just stuck a rock on top of it the past year I’ve been trying to be more creative with my plants and just like a little bit more experimental and have fun with them and I definitely want to carry that into 2024 so yeah that’s why I made the MOs Cube okay so the next plant is my wi you can like see wait this is looks kind of funny you can like see my eyes looks like I have long eyebrows okay but yeah my next favorite plant is my wiia mirabilis this has been also with me for a while now it started off less than half the size I want to say and it’s grown not as fast as I would like but it is picking up speed now I’ve had this plant for a while now um I think I’ve had it for 2 years and I believe it’s probably around 3 years old I got it as a fairly small plant I think it could be larger than it is now but before I wasn’t giving it enough light recently I started putting it in a South phasing window and it’s getting direct sun throughout most of the day and it’s starting to grow a lot more now I’ve talked about this plant so much I feel like but these if you don’t know um they have two leaves and they only have two leaves for their entire life and they just like get longer and longer and longer I’m also going to go over the care because I haven’t been able to find like a good source of information about how to care for this plant um so I’m just going to share what I do and what I’ve heard other people do in my experience now can definitely take a lot of light I mean they grow in the desert naturally so they receive full sun in the desert um but obviously if you have it in shaded conditions gradually increase the light I was very heavy-handed with the pmus I used like 80% pmus and 20% organic material because this grows in the desert I think that your initial thought would be to let it dry out in between waterings but apparently this plant does not want to be dried out and I think this is because it has a very long long tap rout so in the desert it probably like sends the tap rot super far down and has constant access to water so people who grow this plant they say to like always keep it moist and you can even keep it in water like keep a small tray of water so that way capillary action is able to Wick up the moisture and the water for fertilizer I use a succulent Cactus fertilizer that was recommended to me and I just fertilize it with a quarter strength every watering and then the next favorite plant on my list is this monstera irana so this plant has grown so much in this spot it’s getting a ton of sunlight you can see it’s getting some direct sun but I think our Windows have a lot of like sun protection on them or something it’s growing huge now I’m just going to let it keep growing and see how big it gets I was thinking of chopping it back but I think it’s kind of cool to just let it overgrow in this space and see what it ends up looking like it’s like a monster deliciosa but I think cooler in my opinion um I just like the leaf shape more and I like the growth pattern and the growth structure of it and yeah love this guy also I just realized that this is the only um aoid on my list for this year and then next is my Drina reflexa obviously I had to include this one it is one of my favorite plants it’s just so huge so cool and when we moved here I knew I wanted to put it in the spot like this was the one plant where I was like this is where it’s going to go even though it’s in the corner in between these two large Windows it actually doesn’t get that much light because of the trees that we have here we have a bunch of like tall trees that cover up the Sun and filter the light which is nice but the tree the Drina could probably use more light um so it’s getting really bushy and growing a lot of leaves in this area that’s nearest the window but the other areas that kind of spread out from the window and into the room um they’ve like started dropping their leaves and it’s because the plant is diverting its energy and attention to the leaves that are getting light which makes sense it’s just kind of sad because I wanted it to be like you know like I want does that make sense I wanted it to like spread over the room but it’s okay you know it’s still it’s still amazing so I’m looking to get a bigger pot for this guy it’s been in the same pot ever since we got it which is maybe like 2 years now 1 and 1/2 years and it’s definitely very root bound because to begin with it is a small pot for the size of the plant so I’m excited to see what it could grow into once it gets a larger pot so those are my favorite plants of 2023 thank you for watching um also now that it’s 2024 I need to do my updated Plant tour and yeah okay thank you for watching [Music] goodbye [Music] yeah