In real life snake plant wins, because it's the easier in maintenance. A common saying about it is "it thrives on neglect". I propagate them (have about 120 at my home right now, I even produced my own hybrid that's almost completely yellow) and give as gifts to many people, those who never had plants before and those who go for 2 months long holidays, so far no reports of any dead one. It's resistant to drought and overwatering, nothing bad happens when it has too much sunlight or not enough. Having 10 of them at home is work free, stress free compared to having 1 peace lily or other dracaenas.
I must be some special kind of strange.. my roommate left me with some low maintenance plants on his way out and the snake plant is the only one I've managed to kill
You produced your own snake plant hybrid... That's got to be one of the most fascinating conversation starters I've ever heard. Do you think there's any merit in this concept of air cleaning super plants?
>Do you think there's any merit in this concept of air cleaning super plants?
Snake plants and some aloe are quite easy to mutate at random. We're seeing more and more of them every year. I know I have 2 aloe hybrids that didn't exist 5 years ago, got them on ebay. This year, all supermarkets in UK and Poland are full of them, on social media and plantnet [1] we're arguing on what they should be called as each distributor gives them different names. 100s of photos are misidentified, which... kinda isn't uncommon and hard to blame anyone for it.
I also have at least 20 subspecies of snake plants, 12 of them live in a single pot. The yellow one managed to create 3 individual offsprings, if they give yellow offspring again, I'm calling it a win and a new subspecies I _could potentnially_ sell. This is where things go hard. Snakeplant is hard to propagate a subspecies at scale. Fastest way is to cut a leaf and stick in water with any rooting hormone, but it doesn't keep mutations. Water propagation "reverts" mutations and produces the original specie. So, if you have a moonshine [2], cut a leaf and propagate in water, there are very high chances you end up with native [3], almost certain this will happen. You need at least 3-5 generations made in soil with identical mutation to make it more reproducible [4], that's a few years of waiting. Like this guy on reddit, had the plant for +10 years and spent 18 months propagating in water.
Pothos, which the article is about, are a lot different, you can create a subspecies quite efficiently and make it a reproducible process. Even without any gardening knowledge you can learn about it from youtube or reddit comments. Pothos grows really fast and offspring created from a branch is identical to parent (some people have different experience that it reverts to the original variation - jade pothos, but it doesn't seem to be the rule?), so propagation is drastically easier. My guess it that's why the company mutated/fed pothos not snakeplants or peace lily. The most difficult answer is, how to make it mutate to be a more effective air cleaning plant and how to maintain it when the plant grows and hits our homes. Neo P1 achieved that by making the plant to work with additional 3rd party microbiome, which is a bit cheating, but not uncommon [5-6] for humans to manipulate how plants feed.
I should be clear at the beginning, I propagate and create hybrids plants for fun, but know nothing about chemistry and genetics :)
