Festive felicitations to one and all. This is On the Ledge podcast. And in this week's show, we're talking

facts, facts, facts, about house plants, of course. I'm your host Jane Perrone. And in this

week's show, I bring you 31 house plant facts, one for every day of the month. Perfect to fill those

awkward gaps in conversations at family gatherings this festive season. I find myself learning

loads of cool stuff about plants through the making of On the Ledge,

but sometimes I come across stuff that just doesn't fit into any particular episode of the show.

So in this week's On the Ledge, I am providing an information dump in the form of 31 fascinating house plant facts that

you can use in any way you wish. I'm going to say my boring yaddy, yadda, yadda thing that I say

every week, but I do really mean it. Go and look at the show notes where you'll find all of

these facts, plus things like

academic papers where I mentioned them, all the references are in there if you want to look

at those where I've referenced academic papers.

We're not beating around the bush this week.

Let's crack on with our first fact.

Music with our first fact. Fact 1 concerns the string of pearls plant,

aka Curio-Rolianus, the plant formerly known as Senesio Rolianus. And as the name suggests, this plant's leaves

are basically little tiny globes. I think they look more like peas than pearls. But have you

ever wondered about the pointy tip at the end of each of those tiny green spheres?

If you're a botanist, that's what you call a mucro. M-U-C-R-O.

Fact two. Talking of members of the genus Curio, that genus was named by the botanist Paul V. Heath,

not after the word Curio, which is usually defined as an interesting or fascinating object,

often something that's either rare or strange, but after a Roman orator named Gaius Scribonius Curio, and his son of the same name.

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