Houseplant from MIL

[OrionsSparklyBelt]

She gave me this years ago, and despite plenty of 'benign neglect' the thing won't die (okay, I crack and water it when it looks on the brink). I am really not a houseplant person, and just do my amateurish best in the garden.

Can anyone tell me a) what it is and b) whether I need to put it in a bigger pot at some point or feed it or anything. There's the further option of c) moving to the flower bed and seeing what happens. After all these years, I am starting to get attached to it though, so am wondering if I can improve its lot!

It's a cyclamen. Congratulations on keeping it alive so long. The ones you get given as houseplants tend to be the sort that naturally live in very hot dry mediterranean places so they actually like to be desiccated in the summer then resurrected with some water in the autumn. It is entirely possible that being nice to it will kill it dead. www.cyclamen.org/plants/

It looks like a baby to say you’ve had it years.

The way to find out if it needs repotting is to lift it out of its plastic nursery pot and have a look at its roots. If they’re all very dense and circling round the outside of the pot, then it probably needs repotting. Once you get to know a plant you can usually get a feel for when it needs repotting as it will start needing watered much more often than you’re used to with it.

You should only go up 1inch in size for its next nursery pot, don’t repot into something massive.

Also yes, it will want fertilising every few weeks in its growing season. I don’t really know enough about that type of plant to be able to give much more information.

Thank you both 😊 I've got a few bigger pots in various sizes, I'll check its roots this weekend and move it up if needed. So nice to know what it is! And also that by neglecting it I've actually been doing the right thing - that's my kind of house plant 😉

Looks like Cyclamen persicum which definitely won't survive outside. There are a few species of Cyclamen which are happy outside - I started with 4 Cyclamen coum on my gravel terrace and now have hundreds, giving me a mass of bloom in December and january when nothing else is out.

That one is looking quite healthy.The leaves would be going yellowish if it were running out of food. Though the are a bit small, so perhaps a re-pot. Don't do it until the flowers are over. You probably don't need such a tall pot.

The plant itself won't grow larger. It's a corm, so the corm will increase its diameter, and the larger corm will put up more leaves and flowers, but the plant won't get any taller.

@MereDintofPandiculation That's really interesting, i always wondered why the ones I bought then put in the garden after they flowered never grew again . I thought a cyclamen was a cyclamen, didn't know there were different types

I'm happy with it getting wider but not taller. I'll have a sort through the various pot options for something that will still fit nicely on the windowsill 😊 Thank you all again!

Starbonnet Lots of different species! Flowers very similar though with different markings, leaf shapes have more variation. It'll probably come as even more of a surprise that they're in the same family as primrose and cowslip