Book Review: The Plant Rescuer and The New Plant Collector
Buy plants, not plastic! These books will help you keep your houseplants alive - but be warned - you could develop an alarming new addiction
With no garden to have a drink in, and no allotment to grow veg in, life can be cruel for flat dwelling would-be gardeners. Not so many years ago, living in a rented flat, with not even a window box to my name, I felt deeply the craving for a little patch of green to call my own. I thought house plants might be a solution - but they didn’t want to live there, either.
Unlike the lush houseplants I saw on Instagram, mine all seemed borderline suicidal, or at least chronically depressed. Ferns would wither and go yellow. Mould would fuzz up the spines of allegedly bombproof cacti. The leaves of my maidenhair fern would crumble to dust if you so much as looked at it the wrong way. We grew older, bought a house and I trained as a gardener, but still the house plants were unhappy. As a mother of two small children I started to lose patience with anything else living in the house that demanded constant attention.
Then I started to notice something strange. A friend of mine replaced her half-dead ferns with lush, green, plastic ones. Then restaurants started decorating their interiors with season-denying plastic interlopers. Just last week, at a recent trip to GLEE - the trade show where garden centres snap up products for next year’s shelves - faux flowers, ‘green walls’ and plastic grass were absolutely everywhere. The gardener in me is appalled. Plastic plants will gather dust, fade in bright light, and end up leaching chemicals into landfill sites for the next several hundred years. But - reluctantly - I can see the temptation. Plastic plants will be the death of the planet but at least in your kitchen, they won’t actually look dead.
Thankfully one Christmas, about two years ago, when I was just about ready to sling all my houseplants into the compost heap, my boss gave me a copy of The Plant Rescuer by Sarah Gerrard-Jones. And it honestly changed everything. The Plant Rescuer is supposed to be about rescuing plants from shops and bringing them back to life but, reader, it rescued all the plants in my house. The book breaks them down into varieties, explains the conditions they like, and crucially for me, tells you where to put them so they get the right kind of light. It is thanks to Sarah’s blissfully easy to understand explanations that my Maidenhead Fern is frothing away happily on the landing and my Boston Ferns, now divided and thriving into several new plants, are adding a lush green calm to almost every room in the house. If you want to stop your plants dropping dead all over your house, this is the book that will stop the killing.
Do be careful though. Because once you’ve stopped killing your plants there is a risk - and a big one - of a whole new plant obsession developing. The Plant Rescuer is for amateurs. It’s a gateway drug. When I opened The New Plant Collector by Darryl Cheng I realised it was significantly more hardcore. I was practically salivating over the images of Alocasia. Could I, too, get a Hoya to flower in my bathroom? All I’d need would be a stem cutting to get started, after all. This is a book that makes it seem totally normal to rig up shelving units to humidifiers and fit long LED grow lights to house hundreds of Echeverias. Why stop at a greenhouse cabinet? If you have a basement you could turn it into a walk-in grow tent!
So far, I’ve been able to mask my addiction by strategically dotting the plants at different points in the house but when I bring them all together in the bath for a shower and a feed, I do notice a few eye rolls from my other half.
And when I came home from Birmingham Botanic Gardens clutching a teeny tiny Ceropegia (String of Hearts) I found myself casually not mentioning my purchase, in manner of a shopping addict shoving her new shoes to the back of the wardrobe. When a wonderful gardening friend gave me a glorious Platycerium (Staghorn Fern) to rehome I squirrelled it away in the office and started googling wooden mounting methods. And thanks to Gerrard-Jones and Cheng, I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to propagate even more lovely plants, without costing a penny.
In conclusion. Plastic plants are not fantastic. They will not last forever and will end up in the bin within a year. But these fantastic books, and your growing collection of houseplants, could bring you lush, green happiness to last your entire life.