Coffee Table Book of: Houseplants (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Houseplants is a large format book of houseplants, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: monsteras and other aroids, ferns and palms, trailing vines, flowering plants, sunlit rooms and old glasshouses full of green, the quiet work of their care, and the wild forests they come from.

The aroids stand in plain clay pots in bare rooms: a monstera with deeply split leaves in morning sun, an alocasia under winter moonlight, a caladium glowing pink and white, a ZZ plant in a dim corner, peace lilies and a red anthurium in flower, a rubber plant unrolling a new leaf from its red sheath, and wild monstera and pothos climbing rainforest trees.

Ferns and palms fill the quieter pages: a maidenhair against rain on the glass, a fiddlehead uncoiling, a staghorn fern on a plain board and another wild on a lone tree, a tree fern in white mist, a parlour palm at dusk, a lady palm at noon and a slender palm over an empty beach at dawn.

Trailing plants spill from high ledges and hanging pots: pothos, string of pearls, string of hearts, a spider plant hung with plantlets and a striped spiderwort. The flowers come in their seasons: a cyclamen against frost, a red amaryllis in falling snow, a jungle cactus in winter pink, a hoya in waxy stars, a spotted begonia, a jasmine on a wire hoop and a lemon tree in an old orangery.

Rooms crowded with plants, a glass sunroom in summer rain, a bay window at dusk and old glasshouses in snow and rain sit beside the tools and steps of care: watering cans, pruning shears, a glass mister, cuttings rooting in jars of water, a sealed glass garden, a moss pole and a root ball ready for a larger pot.

Short notes run through the book, on where houseplants grow in the wild, how their leaves, roots and flowers work, and how they are watered, potted and grown indoors: a long thin spout lets water reach the soil beneath the leaves without wetting them, the fiddle leaf fig is a rainforest tree, named for big leaves shaped like the body of a fiddle, fern fronds unroll from tight coils called fiddleheads, after the scroll at the top of a fiddle, and drops at leaf tips in the morning are not dew but water pushed up from the roots overnight.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a hardcover with the art printed on the case.