Bird of Paradise Plant Care: The Honest Guide

Bird of paradise plant care is not complicated. This will not stop people from killing their bird of paradise, but the information is genuinely straightforward, and we feel you should have it before we discuss the bloom, which is the real reason you bought this plant and which we will get to in a moment.

Everyone who buys a bird of paradise is buying it for the bloom. They do not say this. They say they love the leaves, they say they need something architectural for the corner, they say a friend had one and it looked incredible. What they mean is: they want the flower. The extraordinary, improbable, crane-shaped orange and blue flower that appears in every photograph of this plant and in approximately none of the living rooms we have visited in twenty-five years of selling pots. We have never once volunteered this information to a customer standing in the shop. We smile, we discuss drainage, we recommend the Joe pot in the 10 or 12 inch. But you are reading this at a distance and we feel we owe you the truth.

We have owned a plant shop in Toronto since 1999. In that time, across every customer conversation, every follow-up, every person who has come back in to report what happened — we have never once heard of a bird of paradise blooming north of the Carolinas. Not once. The ones in coastal California bloom because coastal California approximates South Africa. The ones in Florida bloom because Florida is also, in several relevant ways, not New York. We are not telling you this to be discouraging. We are telling you this because the bird of paradise, without any bloom whatsoever, is one of the most spectacular houseplants available in North America, and we would like you to appreciate what you actually have instead of spending four years waiting for something that the climate has already quietly decided about.

How to Care for Your Bird of Paradise

Light first, because light is where this plant's relationship with North American interiors begins to unravel. Bird of paradise plant care requires the brightest indirect light you can provide — a south or west-facing window, as close to the glass as possible, without exposing it to direct midday sun which will scorch the leaves in a way that is both immediate and deeply upsetting to look at. Most people put their bird of paradise in the second-brightest spot in the room because the brightest spot has a chair in it, or a lamp, or a beloved and immovable side table. The plant will survive this. It will not thrive. Move the chair.

Watering is where the other half of bird of paradise deaths occur, and they occur in both directions simultaneously, which is an achievement. The plant wants to be watered thoroughly — genuinely thoroughly, until water runs out of the drainage hole and you feel you have done something — and then it wants to be left alone until the top two to three inches of soil have dried out completely. It does not want to be checked on. It does not want to live in a state of constant low-level dampness that a well-meaning person maintains by giving it a small drink every few days. Drooping leaves with yellowing edges and soft brown margins are the sign that you have been too attentive. Dry crispy tips and leaves that crinkle when touched are the sign you have forgotten it exists. Both of these people are killing their plant. The correct approach is to water thoroughly and then, we cannot stress this enough, stop.

Temperature should stay above 60 degrees Fahrenheit consistently. Not near a door that opens onto a northeastern winter. Not beneath a heating vent that blasts hot dry air onto it periodically because that is where the thermostat ended up. These are all conditions we have heard described. The plant found all of them objectionable. — Chive Studio

Fertilize monthly through spring and summer with a balanced liquid fertilizer. Stop entirely through fall and winter. The plant is not growing in fall and winter, it is simply waiting, and feeding a plant that is waiting does nothing useful for the plant and creates a salt buildup in the soil that it will hold against you indefinitely.

The Right Pot for a Bird of Paradise

The bird of paradise gets top-heavy as it matures. The leaves reach three to four feet indoors on a good specimen, and the plant's center of gravity rises with them in a way that becomes relevant at approximately two in the morning when the whole thing tips over and deposits soil across a floor you mopped four days ago. We know this because our customers tell us about it, always in the tone of someone describing a betrayal.

We put bird of paradise in the Joe — our 10 or 12 inch porcelain pot with drainage — because the Joe is wide enough to provide stability as the plant matures, deep enough to accommodate a root system that grows with genuine ambition, and the drainage is real. Bird of paradise roots will rot in standing water faster and with more commitment than almost any other plant we carry. The drainage hole is not a suggestion. If your current pot does not have one, or has one that is decorative rather than functional, the yellowing you are experiencing is not a mystery.

The Truth About the Bloom

The bird of paradise blooms when three things are true simultaneously: the plant is several years old and fully established, it has been root-bound for an extended period, and it has experienced a meaningful drop in night temperature that its nervous system interprets as a change of season. In coastal California and Florida these conditions occur outdoors without anyone's assistance. Inside a New York apartment in February, engineering all three at once requires a level of choreography that the average person is not prepared to sustain for the two to four years it takes to find out whether it worked.

Most bird of paradise plants sold in North American garden centres are not old enough to bloom regardless of conditions. They are young plants with ambitions above their current station, sold to people with ambitions about their living rooms, and everyone involved in the transaction is being quietly optimistic. We are not criticizing this. We are simply noting that the bloom, if it comes, will come on the plant's schedule, will require conditions that most North American interiors cannot reliably provide, and will be genuinely spectacular if it happens. In the meantime the plant is filling your corner with three-foot tropical leaves and looking more architecturally confident than anything else you own. This is not nothing. This is, in fact, quite a lot.

What to Put on the Wall Above It

A bird of paradise in the right corner, in the right pot, under the best light in the room, creates a vertical moment that pulls the eye upward and leaves the wall above it feeling like an opportunity rather than an afterthought. Our ceramic wall flowers work particularly well here. Not because we are suggesting you put fake flowers above a live plant — the ceramic flowers are not pretending to be anything other than what they are, which is handmade ceramic wall art that has been in the Getty Museum and the New York Botanical Garden and approximately two hundred other institutions that presumably thought about it before agreeing. A cluster of three to five flowers above a bird of paradise — greens, whites, the warm ochres of the English Garden collection — extends the botanical moment from the floor to the wall and creates a room rather than a corner with a large plant in it.

If you are unsure where to start, the English Garden collection has the warmest palette and the broadest range. It works with almost everything and requires no decision more difficult than which wall.