Devil's Ivy: NASA Air
Filter Study
This Creeper Plant Filters Indoor
Air Pollutants Like Benzene
and Formaldehyde
A recent biological study by NASA in the International Space Staion on houseplants that best filter indoor air pollutants came up with ideal results for certain unsung creepers and vines.
The Devil's Ivy or Devil Vine is one of these unsung, pesky creepers which produced great results for filtering benzene and formaldehyde from the air. It is ideal as a house plant to keep the air quality in your home as good as you can manage with houseplant filters and oxygen providers.
Devil's Ivy is a
native tropical plant that grows out as vines and can grow up to 20 to 40 feet long or as high as your trees grow if they are climbing the trunk. They proliferate like no other as outdoors plants especially when they attach themselves to healthy trees or climb walls and sprout leaves to catch the sun. When attached to trees, the Devil Vine grow very large streaked leaves.
Your own Devil's Vine can sit on a worktable or in a
hanging basket where the long vines can drape over the sides of the pot. Cut at the nodes for transplanting, the roots and the leaf shoots grow out from node points. Let a cutting sit in a bottle of water for a week or so to let the roots grow before replanting with soil in a well-draining pot-mix filled container of your choice.
Devil's Vine thrives well in Philippine climate and unlike western counterparts, Devil's Vine thrives in bright light including direct sunlight. The more sunlight you have, the larger the leaves grow when the vine trunk also grows larger attached to a wall or a tree trunk. These (larger vine attached to tree trunk) are the best samples to get for transplanting, because they have sap roots out and larger leaves allow for plenty of photosynthesis while waiting for the new shoots to sprout from your cutting.
Devil's ivy can grow in bottles or cans with water althought their roots tend to rot. The Devil's Vine normally sheds few leaves, but if constant
yellowing and shedding happens, the roots might not be draining properly and the pot mix might be too wet.
In a tropical country like ours, we don't need to use fertilizer to feed Devil's Vine, the creepers will survive any soil type as long as it is moist and you ahve plenty of sunshine, the plant does creep up trees an d leech their nourishment from the tree sap and when they grow out, the Ivy loooks gorgeous with yellow-green streaked leaves that almost never fade as long as there is sunlight in abundance.
Older thick stems on a Devil's ivy plant are the best ones to root. The
best way to propagate the plant is to clip off a stem from one creeping up a wall and wait for leaf shoots to appear in 2 weeks or so. Stems that are near the
soil line have thinner stems and are ideal for potted indoor plants and deskplant containter.
When a new shoot grows out to 4
inches long, you may cut it off at the soil line, treat the cut end with
rooting hormone, and root it in a pot of rooting medium or peat moss.
Outdoors, Devil's ivy grows fastest in lighted areas, and unlike western varieties, Philippine variety Devil's Vine creepers proliferate like crazy in direct sunlight. Devil's Vine can serve as a ground cover creeper plants instead of carabao grass or lawn grass, but they will always climb trees and walls. Philippine varieties of Devil's Vine thrive even in very wet soil. You must water the vines during dry summers and prune them down when they threaten to overgrow their area.
As indoor and household plants, Devil's Vine is easy to grow and maintain, plus the creepers are your protection from indoor air pollutants such as benzene and formaldehyde which leech off into the air from varnished furniture, old leather upholstery, from household sprays and disinfectants and other sources of chemical decomposition. The plants will absorb and neutralize these air poisons and according to a NASA study of the Devil's Vine in their International Space Station. We will feature more plants from the NASA study soon as part of the Green Minded section to help people get the ones easiest to find in their locale. There might be some at the Manila Seedling Bank relocated sellers at the Quezon Memorial Circle tiangge stalls.
