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Comment by Spare_account | Hacker News Reader

We have one plant in our household, no other plants have survived. It lives in my living room and I have no idea what kind of plant it is. It had long thin leaves, each one is about 10 to 15cm long and 1cm wide and long thin woody stems.

We water it randomly, at one stage we estimate we forgot to water it for around 6 months. Other times due to a lack of communication we have both watered it multiple times in a week. It appears to be invulnerable to poor watering discipline.

Currently it is living in direct sunlight but it has lived in permanent shade for a extended period as well.

I don't know why I'm telling you this, it probably doesn't help knowing that your friends has high maintenance plants when there are invincible ones like ours in the world as well.

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Are you sure it's a real one and not plastic?

This is an excellent observation/question and hilarious at the same time. It could be plastic. I've seen trees in malls with plastic leafs were I had to actually try to rip a leaf to make sure that it was real since they looked so real.

It's a fair question, but I can assure you all it is a real plant and alive. My wife removes old leaves from it 3 or 4 times a year and it grows (very slowly) towards the light if I rotate it.

I want your plant. If you figure out how it is call, then I am buying only those in the future. At this point, I am mass plants killer since they all died eventually under my watch.

A little research has revealed it is a Dragon Plant (Draceana marginata).

Apparently all of the Draceana family are easy to look after.

I have a rubber tree (ficus elastica) and it seems quite invincible. Got it from my grandmother about 15 years ago, it spent three years in my dad’s smoke-filled room and has moved three or four times. Right now there’s direct sunlight in spring and fall and a radiator right next to it in winter. Watering is so-and-so, easily lasts a week to a month without any water.

If I forget to water, some leaves will turn yellow but quickly recover once water is available again.

Oh, and it had half of it sawn off at one point because it grew too large, the other half is now also a very presentable little plant.

Dracaena marginata

I used to have one of those, but even that didn't survive my erratic watering regime... It did outlast all my other plants, though, except for two small cact<i|uses>.

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