BellaOnline Forums Home and Garden Houseplants Ficus elastica (Rubber tree)

The Ficus elastica article (from the previous editor) gets more traffic than any other article on my site. I've never owned one of these plants - they've never really appealed to me. Can anyone tell me what's so great about this plant? Maybe I will get one.

Maybe it's because they are hard to kill, grow fairly slowly, don't need much light and have big leaves that can fill a large space. So for someone who wants a live plant for decoration but doesn't want to have to fuss with it, the ficus fills the bill.

I will admit to owning one rubber plant. It lives in a spot far from any window that none of my many other house plants could cope with, and brightens that dark corner.

I love my rubber plant! I like tropical looking plants and I had a rubber tree before & left it outside when I went out of town & we had a cold snap & it froze.

So, I got another one several years ago & the fairly new puppy mauled it to smithereens. There were stalks and the barest snippets of leaves left. She never bothered it again (It was naked for ages and she was better trained when the leaves started growing back.) It took forever to nurse it back to health. Now, its big & beautiful. The star of my show.

So, it is a very easy and forgiving plant.

We used to have a ficus that was given to us as a house warming gift. it came in a one gallon bucket. We had it for years. It would spend the winter in our family room where nothing else would survive, and summers out on the deck. By the time the outside cats killed it it was in the largest planter we could find and stood about 8 feet tall!

Sometimes in winter it would drop a lot of leaves, but come spring it would return to full glory.

It is a very forgiving plant that fills a large spot in your home and can even be decorated for the winter holidays! It is also a lot of fun to see how big you can get it to grow.