Green Daily

The spider plant is a classic houseplant, often found hanging on the corners of rooms or adorning the tops of bookshelves. Aside from the fact that it is very good at cleaning your air, it is also easy to babysit.

It prefers well-lit areas, but not direct sunlight, and in a tiny dorm room this translates to "anywhere." If you buy the kind with variegated leaves, it will need a bit more sun to maintain the coloration. It needs more water in the warmer months than the cold.

Because it grows pretty quickly, you might need to re-pot it a few times. Unfortunately, this plant's tips do go brown, from chemicals in the tap water, low humidity, and its air-cleaning activities.

If it bothers you, you can mist the leaves to help with humidity or water it with distilled water. You can actually cut the brown tips off, but you need to follow the natural shape of the leaf tips themselves.

One oddity about this plant is that it will grow shoots on long stems, with baby spider plants on the end. This makes it easy to make duplicate plants to give as eco-friendly and budget-wise gifts.

Is your spider plant not making babies? You may have bought Chlorophytum capense instead, which is a different species, although it looks similar.

Impressive fact: Supposedly, Johann Goethe, a German philosopher and writer, was fascinated by the spidery offshoots. He kept several of the plants hanging indoors, some 200 years ago.