Why is it that a houseplant living indoors is so sensitive to humidity, water hardness, watering schedule, sunlight… when the same plant has grown outdoors in wild conditions and thrives there?
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If you drop a rat that was born, raised, and fed in controlled lab conditions outside, would you expect it to live very long?
Controlled conditions are in fact what a lot of growers and gardeners do when raising seedlings for sale in greenhouses. In order to prevent them from dying from temperature shock, the seedlings have to be hardened off, which means exposing them to cooler temps.
SLOWLY.
As in, when I harden a batch of tomato seedlings, I put them outside, in the sun, for maybe an hour at a time with a cold frame over them to keep them warm. Those same tomato plants might be fine six months later in the same temps, but at first, they will die a horrible death if I don’t slowly transition them to outdoor living.
Dying from exposure usually means that any given organism suffers a shock from temperature difference and their body cannot regulate temps, so they suffer cold/heat shock. It happens to people, plants, and animals, insects and birds, fish and other sea life.
So yes. I could in theory take my lime tree that has lived indoors its entire lifecycle outside, because it’s a tree and it lives outdoors in the wild…
…but not in my Koppen climate zone.
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