LVING these houseplants right now

Hello friends! Welcome and welcome back. In this video, I am going to be sharing my favorite plants of spring 2026. If you're new here, my name is Rain and just for context, I have over 160 houseplants which I started collecting over a year ago. Of course, I love all of my plants but right now, spring of 2026, there are a handful of plants that are just really speaking to me right now. Maybe because of their stage of growth that they're in but they are just looking so beautiful to me. I will go ahead and get started and I'm not going to go in any particular order. I haven't rated these plants. I'm just going to pick them at random and the first one that I'm going to start with is the string of pearls and there she is. This is the variegated string of pearls and this plant, this is an interesting story. I've had maybe three of these so far and I actually put this on my banned list. Plants that I was never ever going to purchase again but it kept calling to me. This is the cutest plant ever so I kept buying it and I finally cracked the code with your help. A couple of my viewers reached out to me and you guys gave me advice on how to take care of this plant and so far it's working. I'm so happy. So I am keeping this next to my grow light. Behind me over here is the vertical grow light and let me go ahead and bring it closer to you so you can see it better as I'm talking. So there she is. She is still a baby but she has grown a lot since I brought her home. So these here have gotten much longer and there's some new growth coming in there but this is the most beautiful variegated string of pearls I've ever seen. There's just so much white compared to the last one that I got which barely had any variegation. You can see that a lot of these little pearls have lots of beautiful white on them. I think there's even one right there where it's just pure white. I love when that happens and I know there's no chlorophyll in there but the rest of the plant has plenty of chlorophyll. There used to be a purple flower but it withered away. So as I was saying, I do keep her on the shelves behind me right next to the light so she's getting lots of bright lights and I only water her when I touch the leaves. This is what you guys told me and when they are soft that's when I give her water and I do bottom waterings. So I'll just fill up this little bowl up like all the way almost to the top and then the soil will soak up the water and then she's happy for weeks I think. I think I go for weeks before I have to water her and I'm loving this so much. It's one of the most beautiful plants and I cannot wait to see this thing grow out. This is definitely one of my favorites right now because I finally figured out how to take care of her and I think she is just so beautiful. And I also love the fact that I can leave her out in my ambience. By the way, I live in a desert. The air is extremely dry out here. I would say it's usually around 15 to 20 percent humidity and I used to have this in the cabinet and you guys told me to take it out and I did and ever since then she has been doing great. So thank you so much for your help. But I'm going to go ahead and put her back in her home and then move on to the next plant. All right so I guess I will go ahead and do the next string of and there she is. It is my string of hearts, the variegated one. And this plant is a really fast grower. This lady started out, she was so bald when I first got her. I got it on clearance and it was at the nursery. I guess she was one of the last ones there and she was just looking so so sad. But ever since I brought her home, I keep her in my south facing window. She gets sun all day from morning until night and she loves it. And as much sun as she gets, it turns her really like this super beautiful purple color. And I think she is just so stunning. She is tangled up right now and I'm not about to try to untangle her. I'm just, I'm just gonna leave it as is. I'll probably cut her, give her a haircut, and propagate her sooner or later. I do want to switch this plant over to pond eventually. But let's give you guys a closer look. And she has flowered for me but she does not currently have any flowers. So I don't know if it's the time of year, if it's the temperature, or what. But there's no flowers on her right now and they are really funny looking flowers. They remind me of trumpets or something. But you can see the nice purple colors and this is like, I guess she has like succulent like leaves. I love to touch them and I do the same with her as I do with the string of pearls. I squeeze the leaves and when they are soft and bendable, kind of like you do a taco test on a Hoya, like if you can squeeze it, then I will give her some water. I think both of these plants might be susceptible to root rot so I'm very careful not to give them too much water. So I do let them go dry and then once they are soft, that's when I water them. And look at this. I don't know how long she is. I have not measured her but I'm loving it. She lives in my window there. Every time I look at her, I just feel so much joy inside. It's so beautiful. Alright, so I just put her back there until the end of the video. Once I'm done, I'll put her back in the window. I just like having her in the background of my videos because she's so pretty. But since I was talking about Hoyas, I mentioned Hoyas, I'll go ahead and start with a Hoya next. And I'll do this one. I think this might be one of my favorite Hoya of all right now and this is the Hoya Crassipetiolata. I looked up online how you're supposed to pronounce that so I'm pretty sure it is Crassipetiolata. But let me give you a closer look. So this is one of my newer Hoya. I just got her at the beginning of the year, either that or very late last year. And she has grown some for me so that's nice. But what I really love about her are the beautiful leaves. So she's got lots of splash. It's not really that textured but it reminds me of one of those textured Hoya which I really want to get one day. I really want to get a super like crusty textured Hoya. I'm just waiting for one that fits into my budget and I'll try to give you a closer look. There's a cute little leaf right here. It's kind of like a heart shape. It might be like a deformed leaf because they are all mostly like this shape. I don't know what you call it. It just looks like a regular leaf shape. But definitely this is one of my favorite plants right now just because the leaves are so interesting. I might as well do another Hoya. I don't know if I'll be able to remember every single Hoya I have that I'm going to put in this video so I might not group them all together. But this one is the Hoya retusa and this one reminds me of pine needles. It is so unique and it has grown so much since I've gotten it. And these are actually two different plants. Eventually I do want to put them together and let me give you a closer look. So there she is. It's difficult to capture it on camera but the very tip of the leaves have like two lobes. So it's almost like a heart shape and I think that's like a really cute detail on this plant. And another thing is that I love how the leaves kind of just bunch up at each node and they all kind of it's like it's like a tuft at each node. It is so interesting. I love looking at this plant. I have it next to my bed and in the mornings and in the evenings I just love to admire this thing. And the leaves are extremely skinny and so when I first got it I was really worried that if it got dried out it would perish but it doesn't. So you can do the same thing with this. You can feel the leaves when they feel extra soft and bendable then you can give it a drink. Although they are pretty flexible so they don't get hard like the leaves of other Hoya so you have to be careful. But I've grown a sensitivity to the plants now, the plants that I have, so I can tell when it's like overly soft and I know it needs a drink but I'll wait at least a week. So usually like Saturdays I'll go around and check all my plants and that kind of is a big watering day for me either Saturday or Sunday whenever I have time. And I want to say that I water this maybe once every week or two like I really don't keep track and I've had this for quite some time almost a year maybe and she's doing wonderful. But she has grown out to the point that she has become one of my favorite plants. I might as well do another Hoya. This is my shooting star. So you probably would have seen this one in a couple of my previous videos that I've recently made if you've been watching. But this one has become my favorite of mine right now because it has grown new leaves and also she is starting to bloom. And this is my second try with this plant. The first one I think suffered from root rots. I put a little bit too much water in the cup and I think it also wasn't getting enough light. So I lost that one and I was so afraid to get it again but I decided to go ahead and try because the price was right. And now I'm being super careful not to give her too much water all at once and I wait for her to go completely dry and the same. When the leaves are soft then I give it water. And so far it's working. So there she is my Hoya Multiflora. I think that's how you say it but there are the new blooms that are about to open. They have been slowly growing out and I can't wait to see them fully open. The flowers on this plant are so unique. They're so cool. And the name Shooting Star is a really cool name also which makes me love the plant even more. And this is a thinner leaf Hoya so I am a little bit scared. Like it stresses me out just a little bit that I lost the first one but I'm going to be extra careful. This is the newest growth on this plant here from this point and I think I'm going to eventually propagate it just so I have a backup. I want to have backups of all my Hoya just in case. So the Hoya Shooting Star is not a climbing Hoya like a lot of other Hoya are. It is apparently an upright bushier plant except mine has gotten so top heavy that it doesn't want to stay upright. Okay it's staying upright right now but see that usually she tips over. So I have to I need to make a pot for her so that she has something more substantial holding her up. But she has grown so tall since I've gotten her and Hoyas that bloom make me feel extra happy. So of course this is one of my favorites right now. All right the next one is my Hoya Bretonniere and this one you might have seen in a recent video because I gave her a trellis. And ever since I did that I can't stop looking at her. So she has become a favorite of mine for right now. I think she looks so beautiful like this and she's definitely dirty and I do need to clean her. I'm sorry I just discovered some white spots on the bottom of one of these leaves. I have no idea what that is. I hope it's not pests. But let me bring her closer to you so you can see her. So she's got all of these white splotchy things on her leaves right now because I sprayed a preventative insecticidal like mix of stuff to prevent her from getting spider mites because I got spider mites in my plant collection upstairs and downstairs. Not on every single plant but a few plants and I was just afraid that they were going to spread around to my entire collection but they didn't. It seems like the spider mites that I have I had liked choosing like favorites like maybe the weakest plant and then it just like attacked that plant fully and then didn't bother the other plants. So she was not bothered but just in case I did spray her and however I mixed it like I just left this residue on there. I should clean it off one day. Maybe one one day when I have time when I'm doing one of my plant chore videos I'll try to do that but this plant is so fuzzy and I love to pet the leaves and I wish I could somehow convey that feeling to you guys but I can't. I can say that it is very similar to those toys that you see well I don't know if they still have them around but they used to have these like little woodland creatures and they were like really fuzzy and soft like this has that same kind of texture. This is a plant I think I got this at Lowe's either that or Home Depot one of those big box stores. It's from Proven Winners. I find that they are really smart at choosing the right Hoya for people that are super easy to take care of. I totally neglect this plant and it does great like it lives through drought for a very long time and it does dress fine and she hasn't browned or yellowed at all. Lots of new growth so you can see all of the newer leaves they do not have the white residue so that's how much she has grown since I last since I sprayed her and she's also got new tendrils coming out and I love the variegation and she does get sun stressed but she doesn't have any right now for some reason maybe the sun just hasn't been that intense lately. She does have tiny new leaves coming out look at those baby leaves they're so cute and there's more here right there do you see that I love when the baby Hoya leaves come out this tiny that's the cutest thing ever. So I have been trying to style my plants that's that was one of my goals for 2026 was to start styling my plants because last year 2025 was a year of collecting. I started just after purchasing my very first plant I just kept going and I decided to become a collector of plants. Totally addicted. I just started accumulating all these plants and they just kind of like are all over my house. There's no styling or anything happening they're just grouped everywhere and basically I just put them where they can get the most light. But this year I have been trying to style my plants so I started with the trellises. I've also been making my own ceramic pots in my pottery studio and I'm actually making a studio vlog right now. This entire week I have been filming myself in the studio working on my clay projects. So I am still in experimental mode with my ceramics. I want to make pots that match like individual plants like I have a Hoya Obovata and one of my community members was saying that hers is so heavy that she had to make hers hang. She put it in a hanging planter and I'm finding that to be true also with mine. The leaves are so huge and heavy so I had to make a plant a planter that is heavy enough to hold that thing up as it grows out. But I also want to match colors so the colors of the pots and the designs like to each plant. It's gonna be very a very long journey but it's going to be so much fun and I am having so much fun doing that right now. So if that's something that you want to watch and follow along please go ahead and subscribe to the channel. Since we're talking about my ceramics it reminds me of this plant which is one of my favorites right now and it is my monkey tail cactus. This one I definitely want this to be in a hanging planter so I made some. My very first hanging planters I started making this week and I can't wait to see them finished. Oh my gosh I'm doing all kinds of new techniques with them and maybe I can show you guys like some previews in this video. This is a really cool plant and mine is still a baby. There's a- okay I just got scared because I thought I saw a bug on it but I think it's just a piece of dirt. All right my heart just jumped. Let me bring this up close so you can see her better. Okay I really hate bugs you guys but it's not a bug. Maybe you can see this like piece of dirt right there and it was like moving around it was like falling down and so I thought it was a bug. Okay but it's not a bug. Yay. So this is a plant that needs lots of sunlight in order for it to get those long white hairs and right now it's looking really green but I have been putting it in my south facing window and it's starting to get the white fuzziness so I don't know if you can see that there. Tips are starting to get the white fuzzy hairs which is what I really love about this plant. I love how they actually look like monkey tails once they start to hang down and get super hairy and I love how they get blooms just in random spots on the tail all over. I think that's so cute and then this particular plant right here I have five of them in this pot accidentally got broken off and I'm propagating the tip right now over there behind me but this tip is has started to grow new tails. It is like really interesting. I don't know if you can see that but there's like two I think new little buds coming out and it's so curious to me like that is so cute. I didn't know that that could happen so I'm I can't wait to see what that looks like when it fully grows out and this is an interesting cactus because you can actually touch it so I wouldn't like go the opposite direction because I think you can still get poked but like you can go this way or you could even like pick it up like that and the spikes won't poke you. They can poke you like I wouldn't squeeze them too hard but that makes it so fun so I can't wait for the hairs to go super long and I'm totally gonna pet it and I did just get poked a little bit right there but I am gonna pet it once the the hairs grow out longer. I went ahead and put my monkey tails back in their home so they can get all the light that they need and I'm gonna start doing my plants that are in my cabinet. So I've got one right here this is my Peperomia Ruby Cascade. This is also a plant that was in a more recent video but it's one of my favorites right now so I have to show it again but this one I put in my cabinet backwards from the way it had been growing so the leaves are now backwards so the green used to be on this side but then they turned themselves and I guess they do that pretty quickly so they turn themselves so the green would be facing the sun so now the the red backs are all showing on this side. So I've got it in my cabinet now so that I can see this side but the sun is on the other side so now I'm seeing all the red like coin coins the coin shaped leaves so let me bring this closer so you can see it. So I've got this one in one of my self-watering planters that I made and I think it's so beautiful in this pot. I think it pairs very well together but there's the green backs and then I guess those like to face the sunlight and then there's the red backs and then they're starting to grow it's starting to grow more so there's new growth coming out they reach up first vertically and then once they get too heavy they start to cascade over. This is absolutely one of my favorite plants ever I think it is so beautiful and whimsical and like I said I do have this in my cabinet I think it enjoys the humidity in there it grows super fast in there. I do have other like propagations of this in there and eventually once they start to grow out I'm going to take one of them out and see how it does in ambient conditions for me and I'm hoping it does well because I would love to have this around the rest of my house. It's so beautiful and I also need to put this in one of these into a hanging planter and I've also been making self-watering hanging planters that's going to be so much fun and so convenient. So I water this once the the water inside the cache completely dries up and I don't know how long these can go with drought but the pond will be completely dry the inner cache will be completely dry and that's when I know when to water it and it's doing it's been doing wonderfully just like that. All right my next favorite is an alocasia. Earlier this year I had stated that I was not going to be buying any more alocasia and I'm not I'm not going to buy any more because I'm still figuring out how to take care of them. This one I thought I had lost and it was down to the corn no leaves and then I put it into a dome 100% humidity and it started finally growing back. I think this is called the microrise microrise I have to look up how to say that one but it has bloomed it's blooming right now I mean not with an actual flower but the leaves let me bring her up to you. I am very much in love with alocasias and their beautiful leaves this is the newest one on this plant but this one has come out with the most beautiful leaves I'm so in love with her and she has lost a few and that's normal I guess for alocasias they grow their leaves and they lose the the outer older ones and they just continuously like give you brand new beautiful leaves each one is like a a painting a piece of artwork on its own but as you can see this one is a baby right now I do have her in the cabinet I'll just keep her in there until she outgrows the cabinet and then I don't know what's going to happen to her after that we'll just have to see how she does in my ambient if she even lasts that long I've got an alocasia mellow that was doing really well for me nothing changed with the conditions I don't think and it's losing all of its leaves so I'm not sure what's happening with that but I just feel like alocasias are total divas if they don't have everything that they want perfectly they just cause all kinds of drama so I'm just enjoying this little plant right now spring 2026 that's what it gets it's my favorite right now because it's looking so pretty in this state all right another plant from the cabinet and it is a Hoya that I'm so in love with this plant right now such a beauty wow so stunning this is my Hoya Nova Ghost can you see the beautiful leaves they're so pastel so she was also part of one of my plant styling videos the trellis ones and ever since I put her on this u trellis she became one of my favorite all-time favorite plants so pretty I can't believe it and then if you look up close hopefully the camera can capture the color of these leaves the pastel like pale color is so beautiful and some of them have kind of like a blush like I don't know if it's like a like pinky gray it's like a pinky gray color I put her back into the cabinet and I got the next one from there and my phone is running low on storage I also have to get ready for work so I might have to cut this video a little bit short I don't know if I'll be able to get to all of the plants that I wanted to but let me go ahead and show you this one which is doing so great oh my gosh it's so beautiful this is a newer plant in my collection I was told by the seller that it oh my gosh the color on this plant is so stunning it has like almost like a liquid black color and then it's got these red backings tell me that this is not one of the most beautiful plants ever this girl is so dark and she has been proliferating in the cabinet lots of new growth since I got her she definitely is more high maintenance just because she needs higher humidity so this is definitely going to stay in my cabinet forever I mean I might take a cutting and try to do like a water propagation and just keep it in water like forever out in my ambient conditions and just see how that goes I mean that might work we shall see but I know for sure begonias they love to outgrow their spaces so she's definitely going to outgrow the cabinet sooner or later and I'll have to cut her back so once I do that I'll take the propagations and start experimenting with them but right now this girl is making me feel so happy I love looking in my cabinet all my plants but this one when I see this it just gives me extra joy since I was in my cabinet I thought I would show you my sundew which is currently in bloom this is so cool I was never a plant person before I had zero green thumb when I started on my plant journey so I had no idea that carnivorous plants could flower so I think it's so cool my fly trap is flowering but the the flowers fell off and now it has some buds but they're just not open right now but this one has been budding and the flowers are starting to open up and you can see that they are purple I just want to make sure that you can see the flowers and if you think this plant is stressed and that's why it's flowering you might be right about that I had this out in my ambient conditions when I first brought it home and it started losing like the sundew like the drops that it's supposed to have on the tips of these little red hairs they disappeared and even the red hairs looked like were starting to disappear and I lost some leaves so I put it in my cabinet and ever since then it has started to grow new leaves so there's new growth which is good that's a good sign and it does not have a flower so it might be a sign of stress but I think it's on the mend it's got water in the cache so it's nice and moist hopefully it will recover fully one day and then I'll give you guys an update on that but that's what we've got going on right now all right I'm going to try to squeeze in two more of my favorites and one of them is right here this is my alocasia regal shield this was a gift from one from one of my community members thank you Elle and as I said alocasias are difficult plants but this one has been very easy for me I did put this in a video I made my top 10 easy plants and this was suffering from root rot I had given it too much water by accident and it recovered so that just speaks to the hardiness of this plant it is so large it's a nice statement piece to have in your home the leaves are so beautiful they have the color has like a depth to them that I don't think you can see on camera in person it's like looking at velvet like the color just looks so deep and it's like a matte texture so I just feel like the the way that the light shines off of them it has like this sheen and it can get kind of a bluish like tint also it's a stunning plant and it is definitely one of the easiest alocasia that I have and the fact that it recovered from root rot is starting to get root rot for sure that's great it speaks volumes I think about this plant and I think that this plant loves to be in a self-watering pot so I kind of have that going on right now it's in LECA and I've got the the cotton wicks to soak up the water from the cache it's not a proper self-watering pot but I'm working on making more pots more pots for all of my plants but definitely one of my all-time favorites I just wanted to it to put it in this video because of the root rot situation I think it's a champion for overcoming that situation and definitely a favorite forever okay my last plant before my phone wants to shut off and go to sleep so this is my Hoya Crimson Queen and she's also another all-time favorite but right now she's got this new vine that has all these pink leaves so that's just making me love her so much right now let me bring you up close my neighbors have their landscapers out and it's so loud right now I'm sorry if the background noise is too loud but she's got some beautiful pastel pink leaves happening right now so gorgeous so all that background noise is probably a sign that I should probably end the video I do have to get ready for work but let me just show you the leaves a little bit more as I finish out the video and I just want to thank you all for watching thank you so much to all of my community members for all of your support and for keeping me company in our little group online Cozy Plants and for those who have been watching me since the very beginning of my journey thank you so much for all your beautiful comments that you leave I appreciate your support whether you like my video or you have subscribed to my channel or you leave me a nice comment I love to interact with you guys in the comments so please let me know which one of these plants was your favorite and let me know what your spring favorites are right now thank you so much have a great week and enjoy your plants