Day 27: Today's Pick — Anthurium Clarinervium

There is a small canyon in Chiapas, Mexico, called the Sumidero. Steep limestone walls, a green-black river at the bottom, parrots, crocodiles. If you take a boat down it — and I have, once, on the kind of family trip you remember in flashes — and you look up at the cliff face, you'll see, occasionally, a plant with heart-shaped leaves the color of wet velvet. The leaves have silvery-white veins that branch like a river system, like cracks in old porcelain, like the lines someone draws when they're trying to explain how a brain is organized.

That plant is Anthurium clarinervium. It only grows wild on those cliffs, in that gorge, in that one country. And, as of 2018, it grows wild on top of my refrigerator in Brooklyn.

I want to be honest with you: this plant has a reputation. Aroid forums talk about it like it's a small, aristocratic dog with allergies. Needs perfect humidity. Demands chunky aroid mix. Will throw fits if you so much as look at it sideways. When I bought my first one, I was prepared for a dramatic, theatrical death. I had a little spray bottle. I bought a humidifier. I named the plant Vera, which is the kind of thing you do when you expect grief.

Vera, it turns out, did not need the spray bottle. Vera needed me to leave her alone.

Here is everything you need to know to keep an A. clarinervium happy. Pot it in a chunky mix — orchid bark, perlite, charcoal, a little potting soil. The mix should look like the floor of a dwarf forest. Use a pot with drainage holes. Water it when the top inch of mix is genuinely dry, not "kind of damp." Do not let it sit in a saucer of water. Give it bright indirect light — a north or east window is ideal. Wipe the leaves with a damp cloth every few weeks because they collect dust like nobody's business and dusty velvet looks sad.

That's it. That is the entire care guide. The humidity stuff is mostly fussing.

What you get in exchange is the most consistently interesting leaf in the houseplant world. Each new leaf emerges as a copper-orange unfurled scroll, hardens into matte forest-green, and over about two weeks the silvery veins lighten and lighten until they pop. Side-by-side, two leaves on the same plant can look like two different species. Old leaves go almost black. New leaves look like they've been hand-drawn with a silver pen by someone who took drafting in high school.

The first time I noticed I had grown attached to this plant was on a Tuesday in February. I was eating cereal, looking at it, and I said out loud, to no one, "you absolute showoff." That's when I knew.

A couple of practical notes before you go shop. Smaller specimens (3- and 4-inch pots) are widely available now and run $20–$40. Larger established plants get pricey fast. Buy from a reputable seller — Steve's Leaves, Logee's, NSE Tropicals — rather than a random Etsy shop, because shipping stress on a thin-leaved aroid can be brutal. If it arrives floppy, don't panic; pot it up, mist once, and walk away for a week.

A. clarinervium will not give you the explosive growth of a pothos or the easy reward of a snake plant. What it gives you instead is texture, drama, and a small daily reminder that some things are better when they take their time. Vera is now seven years old and lives on top of my fridge. She has, at this exact moment, a brand-new leaf coming in, copper-orange and unscrolled. I will not stop talking about her.

Buy a clarinervium. You'll see.