PlantFiles Pictures: Snake Plant, Mother-in-Law's Tongue (Sansevieria trifasciata), 1 by trackinsand

trackinsand wrote:
years ago my mother-in-law (for real) gave me a tiny one in a beer stein, no drain holes, just a handful of dirt from her yard thrown in. i put it on my north-facing bathroom windowsill (this was in st.louis, missouri) and there it sat for about five yrs. the growth was minimal, if at all, and the bathroom was really cold in winter.....and then one early spring i started smelling something really sweet in there. at first i just thought it was a new soap or lotion my daughter was trying out and then one day about a week later i was cleaning and went to wipe off the sill. it was all sticky and there was this beautiful big spike with drippy flowers. i was astounded! lol of course, i didn't know anything about plants then, didn't even know what it was, so i just kept the memory to myself.
many years later when we moved to the florida keys, our whole dirt road was lined with them on either side and the first spring i lived there, they all bloomed beautifully and i remembered that poor little plant on the windowsill.