The Universal Story
By / August 28, 2022

Devil’s Ivy: An extremophile in the office corner

We often overlook pot plants. They just sort of blend into the background and become part of the furniture. We certainly don’t see them as dynamic and extreme creatures. However, many of the common plants people have around their offices and homes are some of the most unusual and incredible plants on our planet. The common pot plants often come from faraway places and have only become globally available after being cultivated on mass for their abilities to survive in indoor environments around uncaring and hapless humans. None is this truer for than Epipremnum aureum – the devil’s ivy. Let’s dive in, to house plants.

Humans and Plants: An introduction

All these plants, corn, tomato, potato, vanilla, the rubber tree, the cacao plant and tobacco were originally only in South America. It was only in the 1400s, when people traveled and brought them back to Europe that they made an appearance in Western food (Image: Wikimedia).

People don’t think a lot about plants. We know certain animals as being from certain places (i.e. kangaroos are Australian, bald eagles are American etc). However, we don’t generally think about plants like that. We have an idea that some animals are older than others (i.e. crocodiles and dinosaurs versus mammals) but most people don’t have an equivalent story in their head for plants.

The evolution of plants is fascinating. We have a whole post on it here. Very briefly, plants actually evolved quite late only about 400 million years ago, after the first animals. The most basic plants were lichens and mosses, small plants that didn’t have trunks or stems or particularly complicated structures. After this, more complex plants like ferns evolved, then flowering plants with seeds. Many grasses only actually evolved around 50 million years ago after the dinosaurs died out. 

However, even after this story of the evolution of plants – there is another story. When a plant evolves on one continent, it’s hard for it to get to another continent. So how did plants get all the way around the globe?

Mostly, for the plants we know, plants were taken around the globe by humans. For example, potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, chili, cacoae, pumpkins and vanilla were all only in South America up until about 1,500 AD. They were brought back from South America to Europe by the initial Europeans who ended up in South America. Bananas came from New Guinea and were only domesticated about 400 years ago. This is actually incredible when you think about it – the potato has only been in Ireland, and the tomato has only been in Italy for about 500 years. Prior to this, almost all European food was completely different, based around cabbage, leak and carrots (and we imagine much worse).

House Plants: The toughest of the tough

These are three of the most common house-hold pot plants – a fiddle fig, a monstera and a snake plant. In the wild, all of them are highly extreme specialised plants meant to survive in very particular situations. For instance, the fiddle fig grows on top of other trees and strangles them, the monstera grows in the dark of jungle forests and the snake plant has evolved to survive months without water in deserts.

Modern pot-plants are a very specialised group of plants that can survive extreme conditions the human home and office. They’ve often been gathered from all around the world.  

Most plants don’t make good pot plants. If you just grab a plant from outside and put it in a pot, it will probably not survive. Firstly, most plants need very large root systems that spread out tens, if not hundreds of times further than their branches, to gather nutrients from the soil. A plant in a pot needs to be able to limit and control its grown in a much smaller space. They need to be able to survive on much lower levels of water, but also, sometimes when they are watered, be able to survive brief periods of being completely soaked. And in many human homes and indoor environments, they need to be able to survive on much lower light levels than outside, but also never having complete darkness to reboot (office lights sometimes never go out). Humans also tend to be pretty terrible at taking care of plants – over watering a plant by 50% in one week is like there is suddenly a monsoon and the water is all stuck in the pot unable to get away.

Very few plants are able to survive the brutal indoor life of being taken care of by absent minded humans. The plants that can, have often been gathered from all around the world in very extreme environments. For instance:

  • Monsteras – also known as Swiss cheese plants, are native to central America. They are designed to survive at the bottom of very dense rainforests. Wild Monsteras will grow towards the darkest area they can, until they find a tree to climb to take it over.
  • Snake Plants – are actually only from Nigeria, evolved to withstand the drought – they only needs watering every few months, but can survive being soaked pretty well.
  • Fiddle Figs – from Western Africa, which have actually evolved to grow on top of another tree as a parasite, to gain additional height and extra light, where it will then send our air roots to strangle the plant underneath it.

The Devil’s Ivy: A freak amoung freaks

This is devil’s ivy – Epipremnum Aureum in the wild. It has evolved to be able to survive in the dark at the very bottom of jungles and climb all the way up a larger tree. However, it can do this with almost no water or nutrients – it’s one of the freakiest plants on the planet. It’s gotten so successful at doing this that it basically never flowers anymore – it just climbs and uses its roots to invade forests (Image: Forest and Kim Starr, Starr Environmental, Bugwood.org).  

So, houseplants tend to be really weird extreme plants. But none are more extreme than the devil’s ivy.

The devil’s ivy, epipremnum aureum is a vine native to the Islands of French Polynesia. It is one of the most robust and resilient organisms on Earth. Since it was taken off the islands in the 1880s by humans and introduced into other parts of the world, it has become endemic and has caused some serious ecological damage – particularly in South Africa.

Devils Ivy can:

  • survive multiple months without light, and remain green – hence its name “Devil’s Ivy”
  • survive multiple months without water;
  • be cultivated from a cutting – having both arial and non-arial roots;
  • is poisonous to almost all mammals – including cats, dogs and humans, so it is almost never eaten and has no predators; and  
  • can cause rashes and irritation from excessive contact in animals – just to round it all off nicely. 

However, the most amazing fact about devil’s ivy is – it has evolved to be so successful at reproducing via cuttings and roots that it almost can’t flower anymore.

Many plants reproduce by flowering. When such a plant is happy and healthy, it puts out a flower, which creates seeds and those seeds fall into some nearby ground and begin to sprout. However, there are many other strategies for plants to reproduce. For instance, using aerial roots to spread out or just getting so big that you split into multiple plants.

Devil’s ivy initially reproduced by flowering. It can flower and produce fruit. However, as it evolved to get better and better at reproducing using its roots and leaves, it evolved to flower less and less. Over time, it has become almost impossible to make the plant flower. Now, the plant has not been observed to flower spontaneously since 1964. The only way to get it to flower is use artificial hormone supplements – basically, plant steroids. Devil’s ivy is an extreme alien organism. 

So next time you are walking through a banal corporate office, with some token greenery scattered around, pause and appreciate the history behind the extreme biological freaks before you. We overlook so much of the natural world as humans. We really should appreciate it all a lot more. The pot plants right next to us, seem like an easy place to start.  

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