Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening,
where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. Indoors and outdoors.
I will confess, I do like outdoor plants more,
but let's remember that no plants are houseplants.
Plants just didn't evolve inside homes.
Although snake plants are a super popular and fantastic choice for inside your
house whether you are a houseplant enthusiast, you like to baby your plants,
or you kind of like to forget about them. So without further ado,
cultivate that Like button for some extremely rare snake plants,
and let's get into the video. We're kicking it off with a very basic one.
I'm going to try, in some rough way,
to go from basic to more rare or more unique looking.
This one is the one that you've probably seen in office centers around the
world. It is laurentii.
So this one is characterized by really long, more slender leaves.
And the leaves have this nice goldish outline around them.
And then a very classic snake plant pattern, which is this banding,
this sort of light grayish green and then a darker green banding.
Almost looks like the outside of a watermelon,
at least certain types of watermelon. So this really is your basic one.
This is going to be the cheapest one you can find.
It's going to be the most plentiful, easy to propagate as are most of these,
but laurentii - basic snake plant. Can't go wrong.
The next one I want to showcase, this is superba which, to be honest with you,
looks very similar to laurentii.
The only thing I would say I notice as being extremely different would be the
width of the leaves is slightly wider.
And then also the way that the yellow edging shows up is a little bit
more painted on, almost as if the brush stroke ran out of paint.
You can see this yellow and green. It's a little bit more variegated,
I suppose you could say, on those edges, but honestly, these are really similar.
So in my world, they're a little bit interchangeable. Our next one again,
a more basic one, is zeylanica. This one again, very popular,
very popular,
but doesn't really have a lot of that pizzazz that the laurentii does
with those yellow edges. This one doesn't really have any differentiation.
You've got that banding again.
It's a little bit darker green in the lighter green areas, if that makes sense.
And the same sort of banding here. But honestly this is kind of,
I hate to say it, it's a little bit basic of a snake plant.
But if you like basic,
or this could be a good color filling sort of blocking area if you were to plant
it outside. At least in my climate, you can't go wrong with zeylanica.
Next up we have gold flame. This one,
honestly it's one of my favorites I would say. I've got two different sizes.
So let me show you both of them here. The characteristics of gold flame,
first of all, the leaves are much more sturdy. They're more dense, more thick,
and there's more of a almost striated nature to them where you can actually feel
the textural change in the leaf. So it's kind of unique that way,
but I think for the most part what's unique is it almost looks like a thicker
edged laurentii from the back, from the bottom of the leaf.
But on top, take a look at that.
You have crazy amounts of yellow striping going on here almost again as if
you took a paintbrush with green and painted it over the yellow and just sort of
ran out of paint. And so that sort of follows over here.
These leaves are a little bit larger.
You can see that the edging seems to be a little bit smaller compared to this.
And also the green starts to show up a lot more as the plant matures.
At least that's what I'm noticing.
Could be just a random differentiation between these two plants,
but certainly a striking one.
Makes a statement and will be propagated many times in my garden.
If you like a more muted coloration then go with something like
moonshine.
There are a couple different snake plants that have this almost stripped of
color appearance, but moonshine is certainly the most elegant and uniform,
I would say. You can tell by these leaves.
It's a very light off-white gray green type of hue that persists
throughout the entire leaf, even on this larger one that I have here.
What you'll notice is there is, if you look very closely, a very fine,
almost like half millimeter dark edging around the side of the leaf,
which almost gives it an animated sort of appearance, you know,
with that little outline almost as if it was drawn. So kind of a unique one,
certainly unique if you like that pale look.
Next we have bird's nest.
I would say if you want a zeylanica style looking snake plant but you want it to
grow a little bit shorter, more stout and wide,
then bird's nest would be the choice for you.
You could plant this multiple times in one planter.
You could mix and match it into a snake plant arrangement of sorts or succulent
arrangement and it'll stay nice and low.
I've actually got a little pup coming off right here that I can propagate.
But really it is more or less a basic looking snake plant.
The one differentiation I notice is there are these little almost claw-like
spikes here. They're not sharp. They're almost,
they feel as if they're made out of silicone or rubber.
Really unique little feature of this particular one.
But not too much to say here. Certainly a unique one,
but I wouldn't say it's a showstopper. Next we have emerald star. Again,
a little bit of a smaller one.
You can tell the growth pattern kind of spans outwards.
The leaves are a little fatter and stouter.
But this one is very elegant looking.
It is almost like a laurentii in that it has that
edging, but this edging is a lot lighter. It's almost like a cream,
off-white yellow,
but the difference is there isn't a lot of striation or banding on
leaves. It's almost a pure deep forest green.
So if you want a simple snake plant that just has two basic colors,
not a lot of patterning in their texture,
then emerald star could be a great one. Next up is black gold.
Black gold is interesting because again, these, you know,
at some point you start to wonder how much of this is a cultivar difference and
how much is not, you know. Cause with this one,
you are getting almost a similar thing as emerald star.
Let me grab it just to show you. Look at that. I mean, it's very very similar,
except for that the outline, this pale off- white outline, is much thicker.
The leaves are slightly thicker, a little bit more sturdy. Uh, honestly,
I don't know why it would be called black gold. It's not really that dark,
this green, the gold isn't really that gold. I mean,
let's compare it to gold flame. This is clearly a little bit darker even,
the green is a little darker and the gold is MUCH more gold.
Almost these look like banana peels if you ask me. So this one,
I would say it's cool,
but it certainly is dominated by the gold flame or some other varieties.
Kicking off our final three. These are my top three,
the ones I personally like the most. This one,
I'm not going to say it's my favorite
cause the one at the very end is my favorite, but it's really close.
So this is samurai dwarf.
Now the first thing you'll notice is it just doesn't really look like the other
snake plants. And that's because it really isn't like the other snake plants.
These leaves are extremely thick and sturdy.
I would say the modification on this one would be to water it even less than you
would water a normal snake plant because of how thick and dense these leaves
are. They're gonna be holding a decent amount of water.
The growth habit is almost a stacking instead of a protruding
style growth habit. So these,
these little leaves will sort of stack on top of each other and grow upwards
like this. But again, it's called samurai. It's a dwarf variety.
So it's not going to get that tall. I would say maybe six inches or so.
And so this is one that's relatively rare. Even this size is maybe $25 or $30,
depends on where you buy it.
And so I'm definitely gonna be doing some propagating on this one.
See if I can get my samurai army going. Our next one,
our second to last one is certainly up there in my favorites.
Now I would say some people might think this is a more basic version.
This is just a Sansevieria cylindrica variety called boncel.
But what's interesting about it is the cylinder shaped leaves
have that gray green banding similar to the laurentii and some of the other
more basic ones that we looked at, even this bird's nest here.
You can see the banding is preserved, but the shape and the growth habit is not,
which is to me, very interesting.
This grows almost like a mohawk and it can get quite long. I mean,
these leaves can get multiple feet long if you really let it go.
Some of these ones that you see at these larger nurseries that are hundreds and
hundreds of dollars are massive. And so the boncel,
I just think it's such a unique shape. These leaves, who would have thought,
you know, that this would be something that existed.
If you're an alien and you came down to earth, you would probably say like,
hey bro. Cause, cause this looks alien- like.
You would say that this does not look like it belonged on planet earth.
I like it a lot, but that brings us to our final one. Ooooh,
we are at the final one! This is sayuri. This is Sansevieria sayuri.
This one, I mean, I don't know. This one just takes the cake for me.
It is so unique. It's ethereal. It look, I mean,
just look at the length of these leaves,
very similar to that classic laurentii style or zeylanica style long leaf.
But you have a vertical striation, right?
Instead of going that gray green banding that we've been talking about.
And it's just so unique, it's almost like a moonshine got crossed with,
I don't even know what the other one would be.
I'm sure someone out there knows exactly what the cross is,
but it took me a while to find this one. Very unique. And I really hope,
this one was a little bit damaged. You can see there's some leaf damage here.
I REALLY hope I can get this one healthily growing so then I can start taking
cuttings of it and really start to propagate off this one. Because for me,
if I could have like a long thin planter full of the sayuri,
that would be absolutely amazing.
So coming back into the world of houseplants this year,
I know a lot of you guys have been waiting for me to do more houseplant videos.
Well, it's fall/winter. We're going to do more of those.
And I figured what better way than to take snake plants,
a common often not respected plant,
and bring some spice to it.
Show you some varieties that you may have not seen that you might want to add to
your collection. And so for me, you know, the samurai dwarf,
the gold flame, the sayuri.
Really interesting ones that I hope I've inspired you to perhaps hunt
down, add to the collection and learn a little bit more.
And there's a full snake plant care guide up in the corner if you want to watch
it.
It's an older video and I'm going to be doing some snake plant propagation stuff
as well. So stay tuned, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.