Fittonia albivenis
A small creeping herb in the acanthus family that forms mats on the shaded floor of lowland Amazonian and Andean-foothill rainforest, rooting at the nodes in moist, humus-rich leaf litter. It wants warmth, constant moisture, high humidity and low light, and it collapses dramatically when the root zone dries, though it usually recovers after watering. The silver-veined Argyroneura Group and red-veined Verschaffeltii Group sold as houseplants both belong to this species.
Where it grows wild
Terrestrial ground cover under dense, closed forest canopy in wet lowland and foothill rainforest, creeping over moist leaf litter and humus and rooting as it goes. It grows where the air stays saturated and the ground never dries out.
Botanical sources give dense forest up to about 800 m. The measured wild records have a median of 300 m, but they run up to 2813 m, and those high records are probably errors or misidentifications rather than real montane populations.
🔒 Growing it like that
The wild conditions above, turned into targets for a shelf, a tent or a greenhouse. The full profile has:
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Profiles are drafts built from measured range and climate and from published sources; each section carries its own confidence in the app. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, used under its CC BY-SA 3.0 licence, unmodified.