When I was growing up, my dad took out a subscription to the Reader’s Digest book club. One of the books he bought was called Success With Houseplants, which first appeared in 1979. I still have it and I think that it’s one of the best volumes on this topic that’s ever appeared in print. Over the years I’ve often dipped into its pages and it provided my first introduction to exotic plant families that I would later see in the wild, including Gesneriaceae, Commelinaceae, and of course my beloved Apocynaceae.

Dad loved propagating and the windowsills of our small house were cluttered with jars of water-rooted cuttings and trays of sown seed. Growing houseplants is still a passion for me though now that it’s become a social media craze it’s hard to keep up with the latest trends in plants for the home.

Enter Jane Perrone, whose writing and podcasting has opened up the world of houseplants to a wider audience and helps us navigate this sometimes confusing and faddish world with humour and sensible advice. Jane has now published a book called Legends of the Leaf: Unearthing the secrets to help your plants thrive. and I’ve had the mixed pleasure of reading it over the last few days. “Mixed” not because there’s anything wrong with the book (far from it) but because Karin and I have COVID and we’ve been laid low for the past five days and counting. The silver lining is that it’s forced me to get on with the ever-mounting to-read pile, in between scratching away at the last few chapters of my next book.

In Legends of the Leaf, Jane has taken 25 iconic house plants, and provided us with a potted (sorry) account not only of their growing requirements, but also of their origin, ecology, history in cultivation, and some fascinating cultural and sociological context. I learned a lot from this book and it elevates the plants with which we share our homes from being simply decorative to become co-habitants with rich and fascinating stories to tell us. The author also has an imaginative line in metaphors, for example likening the flowers of hearts-on-a-string (Ceropegia woodii) to miniature turkey basters, or the dried seed capsules of living stones (Lithops spp.) to a Trivial Pursuit game counter.

A huge amount of research has gone into this book and Jane does not shy away from telling us about some of the darker aspects of houseplant history including colonial attitudes, treatment of enslaved peoples, and misogynous attitudes. It all makes for an absorbing read and I guarantee that you’ll never look at your leopard lily (Dieffenbachia seguine) the same way again.

Full disclosure: I advised on the section about Ceropegia woodii which earned me a mention, which seems fitting: seeing the account of this species in Success With Houseplants was what started me on a quest to understand the pollination biology of Ceropegia.