trifasciata
Most houseplant writing is a mile wide and an inch deep: forty species per article, the same six sentences about each, none of it written by anyone who has watched the plant for a year. Search for why your snake plant is drooping and you will find fifty pages that all say the same four things.
This almanac takes the opposite approach. One species, covered to exhaustion. How often it actually wants water — which is far less often than you think. What the leaves are telling you when they wrinkle, curl, yellow or fall over. How to turn one plant into six. Which of the named varieties are genuinely different and which are the same plant under a new label. Whether it will hurt the cat.
Where the popular claims outrun the evidence, we say so. The NASA clean-air study is the obvious case: it is real, it is constantly misquoted, and the honest version of what it shows is more interesting than the myth.
The plant is famously hard to kill. It is not impossible to kill, and the way people usually manage it is by caring too much. Most of what follows is an argument for leaving it alone.