O Christmas plant

Dracaena sounds like the name of a space vampire, but it's really an indoor plant that's known to act as a natural filter for airborne toxins. Wendy chose it to act as our Christmas plant. Not happy with the ideas of growing, chopping, and chucking trees for just a few weeks of admiration or buying a fake one, she researched a variety of houseplants with a nice, vertical shape that would be able to support lights and ornaments. Our home could use a plant in the room year-round, anyway. She noticed Dracaena at a fancy West Hollywood landscape design boutique but balked at the $225 price tag, and then considered shopping for one online before deciding that a plant is something that should be seen from every angle, and in person.


We wound up buying ours from the Sunset Nursery in Silver Lake. We were torn between a healthy, medium-sized specimen for $85 or a taller-but-neglected counterpart that was browning, full of cobwebs, and marked down from $100 to $50. After mulling it over during lunch, we returned to discover that the former was gone and bought the latter. That's what we were leaning toward anyway since the concept of buying the unloved one is closer to the holiday spirit--a real Charlie Brown tree--and we're cheap. Wendy cleaned it up real nice, so hopefully we won't kill it!