How do I protect my houseplants before and after a hurricane?

I focus on houseplants, and I want to be honest that this page sits at the edge of that: storms are a landscape subject here far more than an indoor one. But every hurricane season I get the same calls from clients whose collections live half indoors and half on a lanai, and the advice that circulates locally is almost all written about trees. So here is the houseplant version.

Before the storm: the lanai is the problem

A screened lanai feels like a protected space and behaves like an outdoor one in a hurricane. Screen enclosures fail regularly in storms that leave the roof intact, and once the screen goes, every pot out there is loose in high wind: a hazard to your windows, your neighbour's, and anyone outside.

• Bring everything you can lift indoors, two days ahead. A garage, an interior bathroom, or a hallway all work. Plants tolerate a week in poor light far better than they tolerate being thrown into a wall.
• Lay heavy pots on their sides against an interior wall of the lanai if you genuinely cannot move them. A pot on its side cannot topple.
• Take down hanging baskets. Every one of them, without exception.
• Water everything well beforehand, then stop. A well-hydrated plant handles heat stress better, and you may not want to be carrying water afterwards.
• Move indoor plants away from windows, especially large glass doors, and away from anything that could break inward.
• Photograph your collection. Unglamorous, but it settles insurance questions and it gives you a reference for what recovered and what did not.

The other causes of loss: days without power

Losing AC is the part people underestimate. A closed Florida house without air conditioning becomes very hot and very humid within hours, and stays that way. For most tropical houseplants the humidity is genuinely welcome; the heat is the problem, and so is the sudden swing back the other way when the power returns and the house dries out and cools by twenty degrees in an afternoon.

Plants also lose their light. Shutters and boards mean days of near-darkness, which causes leaf drop in ficus and yellowing in almost everything, and which looks much worse than it is. Open the house as soon as it is safe, but reintroduce light gradually: a plant that has been in the dark for five days will scorch in a window that it handled comfortably the week before.

How to tell them apart, and what to do this week

• Rinse salt off, quickly. If spray came through the screen, wash the foliage thoroughly with fresh water, both leaf surfaces, and flush every pot until water runs freely from the drainage holes. Salt pulls water back out of leaf tissue, so salt burn mimics drought.
• Check every pot for standing water and empty every saucer and cachepot. Days of rain plus a lanai that flooded means a lot of pots are saturated.
• Then do not water. This is the single most useful sentence on this page. The classic post-storm loss arrives about two weeks after the weather cleared, when plants that sat in saturated soil for a week get watered again out of concern. Waterlogged, oxygen-starved soil is exactly what the water-mold pathogens behind root rot exploit, and UF/IFAS notes that palm bud rot caused by Phytophthora shows up with greater frequency after tropical storms for the same reason. Lift the pot. Heavy means wet. Wet means wait.
• Do not fertilize. A stressed plant with compromised roots does not need salts added to its soil. Wait until it is visibly growing again.
• Do not prune what is still green. Remove broken and clearly dead material for hygiene, then wait three or four weeks and prune to what actually died. Bleached and scorched leaves are frequently still feeding the plant.
• Watch for pests two to three weeks out. Stressed plants get picked on, and a house that ran hot with the windows open often gets a mite or mealybug flare afterwards.

When to call me

Call once things have settled rather than in the first week, unless something is obviously collapsing. The most useful post-storm visit happens two to three weeks out, when it is clear what recovered and what did not, and it usually turns into a triage: which plants are genuinely fine, which need roots checked, which need repotting out of saturated soil, and which are past saving. That is a consultation, and Grove members get a priority post-storm visit as part of the program specifically because this is the moment the advice is worth the most.

If your question is really about the yard rather than the pots, that is plants dying after the storm.