This is Matthew of Another World Terraria, where I teach and inspire you on the topics of rare plants and artistic nature displays. In this behind the scenes video, I'll give an informal tour of my plant room, brainstorm some design changes, share a few tips and tricks, and show off some amazing plants.


So, this is going to be very informal. I want there to be more plants in the open air like house plants. And Bromeliads, obviously, is kind of where I'm going right now. You can see a lot of those, and I've got a lot of Tillandsia. You can see hundreds of them. So yeah, I've got some glass tanks that I want to get rid of because I'm tired of dealing with those because they're a pain to maintain, and just, yeah, I don't know, I just don't like them.


So these Pinguicula in there, I'm probably going to move over with - I have a few other ones - and I'm probably going to put them on a shelf like this. Here's a few of them and they grow quite well in the open air, so I'm going to try and get all of them together. That's another thing I want to point out, is I want everything to be grouped.


So obviously I've got the Tillandsia, where they're all kind of in groups across the way here and they're all at the same height and I like that. So you can walk through and see all the Tillandsia at the same height and the lighting is consistent. And you can see I've done the same thing here with the terrestrial bromeliads, kind of the xeric slash mesic terrestrial bromeliads.


And yeah, I got a lot of Tillandsia just sort of all over the place that I need to get up into, uh, yeah, into their own kind of racks and with the consistent lighting. So there's another glass tank. This one I don't know what to do because it is Drosera, and they prefer, at least what my experience, they prefer more humidity. And I tried growing a few in the open air and they did not like it at all. So I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that right now. But I do want to get rid of this short, tiny little rack as well as the one over here. I might just use those for utility stuff and storage.


I don't really like those for plants. And if I get rid of that little one right there, then I can probably put another rack in between the rack on the left and right there, going across and then I'll have more height and I'll be using the space better. And there's a couch back there, which I'm eventually going to move into the master suite area, which is actually going to be, well, I don't want to spoil it, but eventually I'm probably going to be making a kind of terrarium room and the couch will be in there.


Okay. This absolutely ridiculous, absurd plant is Racinaea crispa. It is a miniature bromeliad that grows in rainforests and cloud forests.


So I've got this rack here that I put some plastic sheeting on and it's a little bit more humid in there, but it didn't really work out how I want and I kind of hate it, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that.


I might take that cover off and do something different, but that rack could potentially fit in there, at least temporarily, I could just move it over there. Because that rack is in front of the other one, so any time I need to get to this stuff, I have to move this out of the way. I do have caster wheels on everything, which I think I've pointed out in some of my videos and mentioned.


But caster wheels are really useful on racks and I also have them on my grow tents here. I'll show you my grow tents right now. And I did make a video in detail showing how I made these customized grow tents. They're AC Infinity, but I added these huge windows and then I did the air exhaust setup and all this custom stuff and the rolling platforms with the caster wheels.


And so, yeah, having a wood floor or even if you had, you know, a laminate or an artificial floor, whatever, just not carpet, is really good for a plant room because you can then have the caster wheels on things and move them around. Plus it's easy to sweep, which obviously I need to do. It's kind of a mess in here.


So here's a really cool Oxalis. I featured this species, which is an unidentified species, possibly even undescribed, in my favorite plants of 2023 video. So you might want to check that out and see some cool plants. Also in that video, are these two guys over here, the Tillandsia duratii Rio Grande on the right and on the left is Tillandsia petraea. So those were also two of the ones in that video you should check out.


I got to go through all the bins. I've got dozens of bins and they are, many of them are not looking good because I have not maintained them so there's a lot of mold, there's a lot of dead plants and things like that.


You know, a lot of them do look good, but a lot of them don't look good. So I need to go through everything and I'm hoping that I can get rid of a bunch of bins and make more room for the open air house plant type stuff, or at least make enough room that I can get all the bins and things that are on the floor up.


The other thing that I've been trying to do with the bins and the things in the little containers and stuff like that, is I'm trying to move things into the tents. The problem now is that I ran out of room in the tents; like they're pretty full and things are growing, so it's, you know, you're going to run out of space.


You can see this one, the window is a little bit moldy, cloudy. And in my grow tent video, I talked about how you can clean that up if you have, you know, a tent like this. And so I need to get on that and clean that because it looks pretty nasty right now. This is an Aeschynanthus, the species is smaragdinus, and it is in bloom right now. You can see those tubular flowers hanging down. Really cool Aeschynanthus from China.


One of the things that I need room for most is things that are, like vining and climb and stuff. And there's a lot of things that I really want to get in there, but I just can't figure it out. I don't really want to set up a third tent - I mean, I would love to have a third tent like this, but it's a lot of work, as you can tell in the video it was kind of a pain. And two was like, enough. I really don't want to do that again. But, oooh, I'm tempted because I've got that utility rack right here in the middle that I'm showing you. And I will show you that in a minute, like what's in there. 


But that space could be, it could definitely fit a third tent. So I could have three of those in a row, which would be pretty sweet.


So this is just a smaller rack. And I got this cover that has a silver reflective thing here and a nice, you know, outer black coating, so it kind of keeps it dark in there. And I've got my, I've got chemicals, fertilizers. And so the nice thing about keeping the light out is that it doesn't allow, you know, as much algae and stuff to grow in the fertilizer and the bottles with the water and stuff like that. And I've got my micro fauna cultures in there - springtails and isopods. Anyway, so this is just kind of a nice little way of storing stuff.


Okay, this is pretty awesome. This is one of the smaller species of Nepenthes, the tropical pitcher plants. It does get bigger than this, but this is one of the smaller ones and I really like that. That's a cool one.


So I've got these vertical poles that go all the way down and uh you can put, you know, I've got vines and ferns and all kinds of stuff, but I want more of those so if I set up a third tent, I could do a bunch more of those poles and then I could have a bunch of vines and larger climbing ferns and things like that. So that's a possibility. That's something I like the idea of.


I've got a lot of plants in pots just kind of all over the place because it's not really, this is new to me, the kind of plants in pots is pretty new, you know, in the open air, like a house plant style thing.


I've got a lot of stuff, a lot of experiments and things going on in here. This is a really cool Peperomia that's unidentified as of yet. For me, I haven't been able to find anything like a solid ID on it. It looks similar to a lot of the houseplant type ones, but it's definitely not any of those, so I'm still looking into that one.


I have a friend who lives in Peru, actually, and I asked him about this and he said he's seen some like that Peperomia, that are very similar up in the like cloud forest and also some like open rocky areas and stuff like that. So that's a pretty cool one. And yeah, we'll see how the ID develops on that.


Lots of bromeliads here, which you can tell is a big deal for me. I'm really into those right now. And yeah, so more, more racks.


Here's an epiphytic cactus. This is Pseudorhipsalis amazonica, which is just amazing, the flowers. So those flower buds aren't actually open all the way, but you could see how they almost glow like fluorescent. They're just unbelievable. And this one's pretty sweet, it's growing some new foliage right now. You can see some new leaves coming off. There's a tiny little guy down there, too. And let's see, boy, yeah, here's some really nice rare little mini Tillandsia. But I don't want to go too much into all that. But you can see more bins up here.


So what I've kind of tried to do so far is keep the houseplant and the Tillandsia stuff kind of at eye level for me so that as I walk around and I'm just looking around, I can see the plants open and it's really nice. And then the stuff above and below that, that's closer to the ground or way up at the top, those are the bins.


And although I do want to reduce the bins, I will have to keep quite a few. So I think that's a, you know, a good compromise is having the stuff that's out in the open kind of in the middle. 


There's a little tiny micro plant growing as, like a volunteer, in with this Haworthia. Check out how tiny this is. Look at that! After a bit of research, I determined this is a species of Pilea, but I can't find anything that's an exact match. It's not any of the common ones like Pilea microphylla, or anything like that. So this one's still a mystery.


Here is a rack that has a bunch of bins on it, and it's kind of at the front of the plant room, if you will. So it's like the first thing you see as you kind of walk in. I think I should probably move those bins and put actual plants there, so there's maybe Bromeliads or something like that there. So it's sort of like, you know, welcoming and you see the plants and stuff instead of just sterile kind of bin setup type thing. This is my, there's a lot of quarantine stuff in here, but it shouldn't be a big deal to move that somewhere else.


I want all this middle, this middle space to be more open so that I can walk around. It's kind of a trip hazard and it's kind of annoying and it doesn't look good right now.


I should point out that I've got these cafeteria trays. I love these trays for a million reasons, but in this particular usage, you know, I've got this gravel, this is calcined clay. It's not actually, like, rock, it's calcined clay, which is they fire the clay and it makes it really hard. And then it's basically like gravel.


But I like the way that looks and it's good for the Tillandsia to lay on, so when I water them, they're not laying in water. I don't want them to just be like on the wire rack directly and then the water drips down and I just don't like seeing the wire rack.


I do think it looks relatively good for the, you know, the effort involved; just put a couple trays and put the gravel, it looks pretty nice. And it's consistent and it goes across. One thing I'm going to do with the Tillandsia is I'm going to put rocks and wood and things like that. I've got that going on on a few of them, but I'm going to do a lot more of that and then I'm just going to put those on top of the gravel. So I think if I do that, it will really increase the aesthetic appeal of these displays, which is one of the things that I want to go for.


Those cafeteria trays, by the way, I use them for a lot of other stuff. They're great for working with plants, you know, cleaning plants and potting plants and things. Even if you have a work table like I do that has a plastic cover over it, it's still nice to have the trays because then you can just pull the tray off, dump all the dirty soil or whatever into the trash can, take the tray over to your, you know, sink, which I have a utility sink, luckily - it's nice to have - and then you can just rinse that all off. It's really convenient. And there's many other uses for the trays, too.


Some pretty nice Bromeliads in here. This is an unidentified species. I think it's from Brazil. Yeah, that's from Brazil. This is a really rare Bromeliad right here. It's cool, the leaves have that, like, kind of fold in them. They just have that weird bend. That's actually a really unique, pretty cool thing. So that's a Quesnelia tubifolia. Here's a little tiny mini bromeliad, that's the, uh, let me just double check, because I don't remember everything. Yeah, that's Neoregelia dungsiana, which is one of the really good miniature ones.


This is sort of a little guilty pleasure of mine. They're called mame pots because mame Bonsai are like the tiny little itty bitty ones. I haven't really collected a lot of these, but I did recently get a bunch of these. This is a really cool little tiny, like one inch one. Anyway, I just like the way they look, and I think it'd be cool to put some little miniature plants in there, like maybe a Sinningia pusilla, or Sinningia muscicola - which by the way, Sinningia muscicola is right over here. There's a pretty insane colony of them right in this thing.


This is my Forest's Edge kusamono, which is a disaster, and as you can see, I haven't kept up on it. I got to clean that up and replant it. I do have a video. It's a pretty old video. It's not super good, but it does give you an idea of how I made that.


And I got a bunch of rocks and stuff that I might make some kind of kusamono things on, too.


Labisia species turtle back, which, you know, I don't know if that's really legit for the ID, if it even is a Labisia or not. But this one was in a bin and it was looking really nice and then I pulled it out of the bin, put it in this pot, and I had it out on the floor because I wanted to grow it as a houseplant. And pretty quickly - and I should have thought of this, like, I don't know why I didn't think of this - but the leaves, they got pretty nuked just by going to the lower humidity.


So I immediately put it into this covered rack here and increased the humidity and I'm just going to let it root. You know, because I pulled it out of the bin, so I got to let the roots grow back in and let it get sort of settled in that pot there. And then once that happens, I'm going to cut some of those leaves off, do some leaf cuttings, and then I'm gradually going to transition that plant into the open air to the ambient humidity, and then hopefully at some point it'll start growing some new leaves that will be, they'll have a more, you know, appropriate cuticle surface to be able to handle the lower humidity


Like this, this jungle plant here. This is another jungle plant. And this one was in a bin, but the bin was lower humidity. And I pulled this one right out. And you can see there's some leaf damage, but for the most part, it's doing pretty good. And yeah, so I have high hopes for that, and for the Labisia turtle back, and other plants. I think it could work out, yeah they might, it might be able to grow as a houseplant, we'll see.


The humidity in this room, it varies different times a day and different seasons and whatnot. But it goes from, like if I keep the humidifiers on, which I should show you those, if I keep the humidifiers on and I'm like staying on top of that, then I can keep the humidity in here around 50%, like 40 to 50%. I don't want to go higher than 50% because then I could risk getting, you know, having mold issues in the house and stuff like that. You don't want that. Like 50% is probably a safe number. But anyway, so yeah, I mean most things are doing good in here.


This, well that's a volunteer right there.I don't know what exactly that is, but the main plant in the pot here, you can see the base right there. This is a Zamia inermis, or Zamia inermis, which is a type of cycad which is super cool. This is one of the rarest cycads in existence.


I'll put the info for this humidifier in the video description and a link and all that. But this is a really pretty sweet one. It can hold like multiple gallons of water. And it has different settings for the amount of mist that comes out. I actually have - let me walk you over to the other one over here that is running. You can adjust these things to point different direction or whatever, but I have them all coming off right there, and then there's different settings so I can up this to full power. And then now it'll really start coming out.


This air filter here normally is on. I turned it off so that the sound isn't in the video, but that one, I just turn that on full blast normally. And what it does is it blows the humidity over into the plant room.


And then this is an air conditioner, but I run it in fan mode in the winter. So it is just blowing air. It's not doing anything, but just being a fan. And it oscillates. So this oscillates up and down and it blows the humidity directly from that humidifier over here as well. You would be really surprised how big of a difference it makes to have a fan with your humidifier.


If you have a humidifier and it's got one of those built in little like hygrometer things or whatever, where it tells you the humidity, but it's really close to the actual unit, don't trust those. That's ridiculous because, the humidity, the air, you know, it needs to spread. So if you've got the - if you're reading the humidity and it's like a foot, or like inches or a foot away from the unit, obviously it's going to look like the humidity is really high. But if you go five feet away, ten feet away, whatever, humidity is not going to be even remotely close to what that sensor says on the actual humidifier unit.


So I'd highly recommend getting something like this. This is the Thermpro or Thermapro, or whatever. I don't know. But anyway, I've got a bunch of these all around and it tells you the humidity, temperature, all that and it's got the like low and high record that it saves.


So you need big good humidifiers. The little tiny ones won't do a big room like this. And like I said, this goes into my kitchen, and then all the way, like it's a very open plan house. So I've got a lot of air space, but it helps that I have these trays of rocks and gravel and the Tillandsia, and all of the bins, and just all of this humidity and these plants and I'm misting them and I'm watering them.


So that really helps with the humidity, and then the warmth of the lights. So that helps a lot. So the humidifiers, you know, just add that extra bit that I need, especially in the winter when it gets crazy, super low humidity.


All right. I finally pulled the trigger on one of these. They are commonly known as micro strawberry Begonias. They're not a Begoni, they are a Saxifraga. Based on my research and talking to a lot of people, we think it's most likely a form of Saxifraga stolonifera. Still kind of unknown, but I'm calling it Saxifraga cf stolonifera.


You know what? I knew how much you wanted to see this rack of Pinguicula set up.


So while I was editing the video that you're watching, I got it done. Decided to put it in here. A lot of these aren't looking super good because I haven't really been taking that great of care of them, but I'm excited about how they will look once I do take better care of them and they all start to grow nice and I clean up some of the old leaves. Like those Heliamphora in the back there are looking pretty rough, but we'll get that all cleaned up and then you'll get an update in the future when everything's looking pretty sweet.


This Pinguicula in the back there, that's laxifolia, which is one of my favorites. That one grows hanging off of rocks in the wild. And I'm going to hang one of those in my grow tent and it's going to be pretty sick.


All right, I'm playing musical racks here. So there was that one in this area that was covered in plastic, and I did, in fact, move it over to this area in between those two racks. And I took the little tiny rack out.


Okay, so this is the workroom. It's about as embarrassing, if not more embarrassing, than the plant room in terms of how messy and crazy it is. But that's just the real deal. But I've got these self-watering pots here. They're all exactly the same design and style, but in different sizes. And there were a whole bunch of those in the plant room that you probably saw with all the bromeliads. So I'm going to be potting up all my other plants in that, all the house plant stuff and the bromeliads that haven't been moved into pots.


I just keep buying more of these exact same ones because I like the way they look and I like the functionality and everything and I want all my plants to be in consistent pots. And I'm afraid at some point they'll change the design or they won't be available anymore.


I'm not going to show you too much other stuff in here. I just wanted to show you those pots. There are a few terrarium things and it's a disaster and I can't even show you. It's horrible.


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