Old postcards Decorative houseplants

Decorative houseplants differs from the neighbouring flower sections in two ways: every card is dated 1974, and the captions read almost like botanical labels, with genus and species. Most of the plants come from the tropics of the Americas and Africa.

Hybrid hippeastrum is a bulbous plant from tropical and subtropical America, from Mexico to Argentina, often called amaryllis although true Amaryllis is a South African genus. Three cards are given to cacti: Aporocactus flagelliformis, the rattail cactus; Rhipsalidopsis rosea, an epiphytic cactus from southern Brazil; and Gaertner’s epiphyllopsis (Rhipsalidopsis gaertneri), known in English-speaking countries as the Easter cactus.

Clerodendrum thomsoniae, the bleeding glory-bower, is an evergreen climber from tropical West Africa with a white calyx and a red corolla; it was named at the request of the missionary William Cooper Thomson in honour of his late wife. Columnea and Episcia cupreata, the flame violet, both belong to the gesneriad family and come from tropical America; the episcia grows wild in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.

Taken together, these vintage postcards show which exotic plants Soviet indoor gardeners were reading about in the mid-1970s. Each image is a scan of an original 1974 card.