Zamioculcas zamiifolia Seeds | ZZ Plant
LATIN NAME: Zamioculcas zamiifolia
COMMON NAME: ZZ Plant
Plant Profile
The ZZ plant is the only species in its genus, a succulent perennial from eastern Africa with a potato-like rhizome and erect compound leaves 40 to 60 cm long, each carrying six to eight pairs of glossy leaflets. It is a member of the arum family, which explains the flower it eventually produces and the chemistry that defends it.
It grows slowly. A leaf takes months to unfurl and stays on the plant for at least six months, often far longer, and the whole plant adds height in steps rather than continuously. That slowness is why a large specimen costs what it does, and why the plants on sale in small pots are considerably older than they look.
The flower is a curiosity rather than a feature. A spadix 5 to 7 cm long, yellow to bronze, wrapped in a yellow-green spathe, appears at the base of the stems in late summer and is usually hidden among the leaf bases. Most owners never see one, and many are surprised to learn the plant flowers at all.
Science & Biotechnology
The leaves are 91 per cent water and the petioles 95 per cent, which is the whole secret of the plant’s reputation for surviving neglect. A leaf that is almost all water, held on a thick stalk above a storage rhizome, can lose a great deal before it shows damage, and it will not shed the leaf to save the stem.
That water is also why overwatering kills it. The rhizome sits in the compost like a potato in a bag, and in wet soil it rots from the outside in. Most of the plants that die indoors die in winter, in a cool room, in a pot that has not dried out since October and will not dry out before March.
The genus sits in the Araceae, a family full of calcium oxalate and cyanogenic compounds, and the sap is an irritant. A brine shrimp assay found no lethality, which is a modest result and not a licence. Keep it away from animals that chew, and wear gloves when dividing a large plant, because the cut rhizome bleeds. The list carries allies in Elymus trachycaulus, Setaria faberi and Axonopus compressus.
Uses & Benefits
It is a houseplant, and a very good one for the places where nothing else lives: a north-facing room, a corridor, an office with no window. It tolerates low light for months, though it grows reluctantly and stretches towards the glass, and it recovers when it is finally moved somewhere brighter.
In Malawi and Tanzania the leaf juice is used for earache, the bruised plant as a poultice, and the root applied to ulcers. None of this is supported by trials, and the plant is an irritant, so the record is worth knowing rather than acting on. The chemistry has been studied far more thoroughly than the medicine.
The claim that it purifies air deserves a note. A laboratory study found that it removed benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene at a small molar flux, and the authors were careful to say that any effect in a real room is unconfirmed. It is a plant, not a filter, and the difference matters when somebody is selling you one.
Growing from Seed
Seed is rarely set in cultivation and rarely sold; the trade propagates by division and by leaf cuttings. A single leaf, its base pushed into gritty compost inside a sealed bag, will produce a small bulb in a few months and a plant in a year or more. It is slow, cheap and reliable.
Use a compost that drains sharply, water only when the top half of the pot is dry, and reduce watering to almost nothing between November and March. A pot with no drainage hole is a slow execution. Bright indirect light suits it; full sun scorches the leaves and turns them yellow at the edges.
Keep it above 15 °C, with best growth between 18 and 26 °C. It will not take frost, and cold wet soil is worse than cold dry soil. Repot every second or third year, in spring, into a pot only one size larger, because a big pot of wet compost around a small rhizome is the usual way to lose one.
Our Take
It is a plant for people who forget things, and it is honest about that. There is no flower to miss and no season to catch; it sits there, glossy and upright, and asks for water four or five times a year. Very few houseplants are that undemanding, and none of them look this good in a dark corner.
The price is the shape of the thing. Wide-scale propagation began in Dutch nurseries around 1996, and the market has been flooded ever since, so a plant that cost a fortune twenty years ago is now ordinary. Buy a small one and wait; it will outlive the furniture.
Related Reading
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