Houseplants E-Book

Clare Matthews

• Herausgeber: IMM Lifestyle Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 172

Beschreibung

This inspirational and practical book demonstrates how well-chosen houseplants breathe life into an interior, lifting the spirits, providing a burst of colour and texture and fill a room with scent and character. Informed and imaginative text by Clare Matthews and stunning photography by Clive Nichols demonstrate how tired or unwelcoming rooms can be instantly transformed with a few well-chosen houseplants. Choosing the right plant for difficult locations, using colour creatively and the importance of texture, shape and scale are all explained. The book reveals how to use budget plants and containers to great effect as well as how to get the best from investment plants. There are separate chapters on flowering and foliage plants, on containers and plant choices for difficult positions, as well as advice on feeding, watering and dealing with problems. It concludes with a plant profile directory that gives good, solid information on the care of the most commonly grown houseplants.

Leseprobe

Houseplants

Houseplants

Plants to add style and glamour to your home

Contents

Introduction

Designing with houseplants

Pot, plant, place

Colour, mood, style

Plant position

The art of display

Flower power

For the moment

For every season

Bringing the outside in

Enduring blooms

Exotic orchids

Heavenly scent

Fabulous foliage

Foliage plants

Ferns

Bromeliads and air plants

Bonsai

Cacti and succulents

Palms and cycads

Fresh-air plants

Containers

The basics

Quick cover-ups

Mulch

The right spot

The great survivors

Difficult conditions

Plants for bright places

Plants room by room

Plant care basics

Watering and feeding

Pests and diseases

Quick problem solver

Potting on

Plant care profiles

Index

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I have been growing houseplants for as long as I can remember. My first plants were tiny cacti from the garden centre shelves and jade plants I grew from leaf and tip cuttings from my mother’s larger plant. I even planted a bottle garden, inspired by a Ladybird book, with random, hopelessly small plants. I had patchy success, but am still inspired by the seemingly infinite array of plants that will grow inside and the beauty and soul they bring to a house. If I ever need to give the house or my spirits a lift, plant shopping is often the answer.

While I cannot pretend to be the perfect indoor gardener, I have learned which plants are easy and dependable and which are troublesome and demanding. I have also experienced how the right plant, in the right container, is an immensely valuable decorative tool and have developed a pragmatic approach to using plants. Most of the pictures in this book were taken in my homes, with plants and containers featuring in different combinations to demonstrate the range of possible effects that can be achieved. They also demonstrate how plants can be used to provide the finishing touches in interior decorating schemes.

Even a small unassuming houseplant will add a welcome extra dimension to an interior.

In this book, I hope to share some of what I have learned and inspire you to use more plants to enrich your home with colour and life. As in my garden, I want to use hardworking, good-value plants as much as I can, getting maximum impact for minimum effort and cost, so there is plenty of information on how to match the needs of the plant to the location, the first step to a healthy houseplant. I have also included lists of tough, almost indestructible plants along with suggestions for plants suited to those who just cannot get watering right.

You really do not need to be a dedicated indoor gardener or have green fingers in order to make your home more beautiful with plants. Be inspired by the following pages to bring freshness and vibrant living plants into your home.

Clare Matthews

Sun-loving Aeonium arboreum ‘Schwarzkopf’ and bronze Air plants (top left) are perfectly complemented by sun-baked terracotta and driftwood. The Glory lily (Gloriosa superba ‘Rothschildiana’ top right) is brilliantly colourful but its flowers are exquisitely shaped. With all the uplifting promise of spring, just a few hyacinths (bottom left) will fill a room with their sweet, heady fragrance. Given the space, indoor plants can be productive as well as decorative (bottom right); here melons and tomatoes scramble up rustic obelisks and onto the conservatory wall beyond.

Designing with houseplants

Houseplants breathe life into an interior: plants lift the spirits, they can provide a burst of colour and rich texture, as well as fill a room with scent and add character. Houseplants are wonderfully versatile, with plants suited to the style and practicalities of just about every room. Used as decorative pieces, living art works or as you might use cut flowers, a few relatively inexpensive, well-chosen plants will reinvigorate a lacklustre room or embellish and enliven a new interior design scheme. The effect of plants on the way a room looks and feels is immense – decorative schemes are softened and rooms made more welcoming by bringing indoors these representatives of the outside world. They are a vibrant link with nature. Teamed with the right container, a houseplant provides the essential finishing touch to any room.

Pot, plant, place

In order to have healthy, fantastic-looking houseplants there are three fundamental points to consider – pot, plant and place. Each point carries equal weight in making a scheme a success, but the absolute ideal starting point is undoubtedly place. Start by looking at a room carefully, considering where a houseplant might add a touch of pizzazz, brighten a dull corner or perhaps soften or disguise some unsightly feature. Then consider what the conditions are like in that position: what sort of light falls there; what is the temperature and does it fluctuate; and is the room dry or humid? Once armed with this information and a good idea about the style of plant that will best suit the room, you are ready to choose the plant.

Crammed into a fresh light green basket, these African violets have a country-cottage charm.

In reality, most plants are impulse buys, plucked from enticing displays in supermarkets or garden centres. Impossibly green and lush or seductively smothered in a profusion of buds promising to burst into a fantastic floral display, these plants are not always the best investment. Firstly, because they are probably not ideally suited to the places where you really need plants and secondly, because many of these plants are just not a long-term proposition, especially flowering plants shipped in for gift-giving times of the year. Often produced by manipulating the hours of light they receive, these plants are grown in perfect conditions; some are treated with dwarfing chemicals to promote flowering on small plants, all of which means they may be hard to grow on after they have performed once. These plants have their place; a joyful splash of seasonal colour is immensely heartening and they might survive to flower again if you are extremely lucky, but they are not suitable as the mainstay of any scheme.

Other impulse buys result in you wandering around the house, clutching the newly acquired plant, desperately sitting it in possible places and standing back to assess its impact with an appraising eye, only to realize that the conditions in this spot are not right for the plant.

In order to get the maximum effect for the least effort, the ideal approach is to choose a plant suited to the specific place, suited in style, habit and needs. Trying to mollycoddle a plant that is not getting what it needs is hard work; it is much easier to choose a specimen that will thrive naturally in the spot you have to fill. Plants from a good supplier are much more likely to be long-lived. Looking at the section on pages 108–121 before you head out to the beguiling nursery displays will help sort out some potential candidates.

The deeply coloured burgundy and chocolate leaves of this begonia set in a pewter-shaded ceramic pot are perfectly in tune with the rich tones of the furnishings of this interior.

Beyond the practical considerations, choosing a plant is much like selecting any other furnishing for your home, its character should suit the room, and its colours and textures work with those of the other elements. Plants have a staggering array of forms and habits – the arching feathery fronds of a delicate fern will have a very different visual impact from that of the tough-looking croton with its brash, variegated leaves, in spite of the fact that they may be a similar size. Most importantly you should like the plant; it seems obvious but there is little fun to be had from living with a plant, perfectly suited to your kitchen windowsill, for example, if you just don’t like the way it looks. Taste in plants can be quite personal, some plants may have happy or unfortunate associations; some plants are now considered old-fashioned, like the cheese plant or rubber plant, while others are considered twee. Equally, it may be best to avoid the fashionable ‘plants-of-the-moment’ simply because fashions change quite rapidly. Ultimately, it seems best to ignore all this and take your inspiration from the plants you like and those that suit your home.

This confident choice of wall colour could diminish the wrong plant but instead the delicate, yet vibrant yellow flowers of this orchid have more presence and more impact because of the bold colour combination.

The final element is the container. The potted plant is a partnership between the plant and the container chosen to disguise its plastic pot, and in some respects the appeal of the plant is governed by the style of the pot or container chosen to hold it. The cachepot should obviously suit the plant and the place in shape, size and style. While African violets in a lime-green basket look pretty, fresh and evoke the feel of the country cottage, they may not look their best in a sharp-edged, shiny surfaced modern container. Getting the container and plant partnership right is a balancing act, and both should gain from the partnership.

The photographs on the colour, mood and style pages (see pages 13–19) show how a variety of houseplants and their containers can contribute to the appeal of a number of interiors, from the cool chic of white orchids, through the clean, contemporary appeal of tiny succulents in metallic containers to the jubilantly colourful bowl of spring bulbs and more. With a touch of imagination and experimentation, the possibilities for enhancing your home with houseplants are remarkable and achievable. Plant, pot, place – get this combination right and aesthetic and practical success is assured.

Colour, mood, style

The three elements of colour, mood and style are inescapably intertwined; the ideal is to manipulate them in harmony to achieve the type of room decor in which you want to live. Colour may help create a mood – often a particular style of decor may lend itself to a specific palette. Houseplants are fantastic, versatile and inexpensive furnishings which, when used with flair, can help to enhance any scheme.

This bowl of glowing tulips immediately attracts the eye, delivering a powerful measure of colour but the way the golden mirrored bowl sits harmoniously with its surroundings stops them looking wildly out of place.

Colour can exude energy, excitement and drama at one end of the scale or harmonious calm and tranquillity at the other. Our emotional response to colour is both personal and shared, a product of individual tastes, experiences and cultural influences. Personal taste, quite rightly, and even fashion will inevitably play some part in the choice of colour and the style of your interior, though plant displays offer a way to make rooms individual, a chance to add something beautiful or striking with a touch of your own personality. Houseplants deliver a compact, instant punch of colour to enhance any scheme, not just in their rainbow array of blooms but in their fruits, stems, foliage and even the containers in which they are grown. Whether it is a floral decoration on a coffee table echoing a glowing accent colour in the soft furnishings, a beautifully restrained white orchid in an effortlessly chic interior or a delicate, pure green fern softening the hard stone and ceramic edges in a tranquil bathroom, each will improve the atmosphere and character of the room they inhabit.

The colour provided by plants is also useful in manipulating space and focusing attention towards or away from specific elements of a space. Strong bright colours foreshorten a space, instantly seizing the eye. A bold red amaryllis on a windowsill will grab the eye, distracting from the view beyond; set on a table at the centre of the room the same scarlet plant focuses attention away from the edges of room. Use shades of blue where you want to stretch space, since it is the colour that most recedes, giving the impression that a distance is further than it seems. The following pages present an array of images to inspire. They illustrate how everyday houseplants contribute colour, atmosphere and style to interiors.

With a wealth of flower colours available, growing amaryllis is a wonderful way to boost the colour scheme in any room through the winter. The delicate pink of this amaryllis (a Hippeastrum hybrid) has been carefully chosen to work with the wall colour

This maidenhair fern may be a challenge to keep but the perfection of its delicate green foliage is great for softening the harshness of bathroom fittings and surfaces.

Hot, bold, brilliant

These striking colours always capture attention. They might be used to sound a welcome discordant note in a pale interior or to highlight part of the colour scheme of a room. They are demanding, invigorating and brave, colours so intense you might imagine they actually radiate heat. A startling burst of fiery orange, searing red or brilliant yellow brings energy, excitement and life to any scheme. Housing these plants in a neutral container can dull their impact slightly, but why not use contrasting or similarly coloured pots to really ramp up the impact.

hot, bold, brilliant plants

• Gerbera

• Primula

• African violets

• Tulips

• Lilies

• Bougainvillea

• Anthurium

• Begonias

• Pot chrysanthemums

• Clivia

• Coleus

• Glory lily

• Impatiens

• Kalanchoe

• Poinsettia

• Cinerarias

Like a ball of flame, the flowers of this Clivia burn brightly against the white painted wood. The plain black ceramic pot lets the flower be the star.

Cool sophisticates

It is not just the elegant muted tones of these plants that earn them a place in this category, their graceful shapes also play a part. To succeed these plants require a stylish container and the whole impression must be one of effortless charm. Blooms of cool white, cream and silver are perfectly suited to an interior where simplicity evokes a luxury and comfort not common to other pared-down or minimal interiors. White and cream orchids and lilies are at once the obvious and the perfect choice, the epitome of chic and restrained glamour. Arching palms, redolent of palm courts, or a tall, narrow-leaved bamboo are well suited to a sophisticated interior where the stolid rubber plant or cheese plant would fail.

elegant plants

• White lilies

• Orchids

• Narrow-leaved bamboos

• Palms

• Umbrella plant

• False aralia

• Ferns

• Aspidistra

• Jasmine

• Most plants with white flowers in the right container

Perhaps because it has a cast-iron constituton, the elegance of the aspidistra is often overlooked, yet it is a graceful foliage plant when set in the right container.

A powder-pink primula in a delicate pink pot looks fresh, pretty and charming, while the decorative tea-light holder makes an ideal cachepot for a small plant. The primulas will only be indoors for a few weeks, after which they can be planted out in the garden.

romantic plants

• Mosaic plant

• Polka-dot plant

• Impatiens

• African violet

• Kalanchoe

• Spring bulbs

• Pelagoniums

• Aluminium plant

• Primulas

• Violets

Pretty romantics

Ceramic bowls, floral jugs and teapots crammed with small flowering plants, baskets laden with pretty foliage like that of the pink polka-dot plant, and worn vintage terracotta planted with spring bulbs, all evoke the cosiness of a country cottage and have a soft, feminine charm. Flower-studded azaleas, dainty cyclamen, jewel-flowered African violets and miniature roses in delicate shades of pink and lavender, grown in fussy vintage china will help to amplify the romantic charms of an interior. Small foliage plants or useful culinary herbs clustered in soft, worn wood will add a fresher note. Keep plants small, grouping them to create impact.

Large glass vases encase these striking but extremely spare plants. Grown hydroponically (without soil, in water), these Lucky bamboo are simply pushed into a layer of crushed cockle shells, though any gravel or glass pebbles would work equally well, then water is added to cover the shells.

The clean lines of this metallic container, with its three almost perfectly matched geometric Haworthias mulched in bright white gravel, makes more from less. Alone the plants are small and insignificant; displayed as they are here, the whole thing is a triumph, the perfect adornment for a pared-down interior.

Crisp contemporaries

The clean lines of a contemporary interior demand equally pared-down bold plants that might almost be exercises in geometry, housed in stark containers. Uncluttered hi-tech interiors, gleaming with metal, stone and leather really benefit from the introduction of life that a plant injects into a room. In this controlled interior, single impressive architectural specimens will have a brilliant effect, as will the almost otherworldly forms of cacti and succulents. Marshalled in orderly rows, perfectly shaped succulents planted in pots severe in their simplicity make the ideal embellishment in these highly contrived interiors. The injection of greens into such a scheme also provides the eye with a fresh focal point.

contemporary plants

• Barrel and candle form cacti

• Succulents

• Architectural ferns

• Yuccas

• Dracaenas

• Palms

Tranquil verdure

Green fields, lush woodland, the fresh green of spring – these comforting associations carried by the presence of lush foliage plants in the right setting, enhance an atmosphere of tranquillity and well-being. Amid the hustle and noise of modern life many of us strive to create a sanctuary within our homes, a peaceful haven – for some this might be a serene bedroom or an indulgent bathroom. Healthy green foliage plants set in sympathetically chosen containers will promote this restful mood. Green comes in a myriad of shades, fresh green foliage has the optimism of the arrival of spring, the lush green of palms and tropical plants hints at warmer climes, but avoid dull, lifeless greens like that of the rubber plant. Plants and pots should be simple.

tranquil plants

• Bamboo

• Ferns (especially suited to bathrooms)

• Palms

• Weeping fig

The simplicity and tranquillity of this windowsill display comes from carefully chosen pots and repeated mounds of uncomplicated plants. Mind-your-own-business (Soleirolia soleirolii) domes are punctuated by Kalanchoe ‘Magic Bells’.

Plant position

Before buying any plants, ideally you will decide which rooms might benefit from the addition of a few environment-enhancing houseplants. Setting aside the matters of colour and style (discussed earlier), there are some practical considerations; chief among these is determining which plants will thrive in the conditions prevailing in the spots you have in mind. It is also worth thinking about scale: large plants cost more to buy, but one good-sized specimen may have more impact and be easier to care for than several smaller ones. Relatively insignificant plants dotted around a large room, such as an open-plan living space, can look lost, whereas if they are grouped en masse on a table or in a fireplace they will have more impact. Intimate spaces, however, are suited to small arrangements, where intricate details of foliage and flowers are best appreciated.

Bright pink poinsettias in equally brilliant pink pots provide a colourful but unusual take on decorating for Christmas. Seasonal plants are an easy, manageable way to extend the trappings of the festive season into the kitchen.

When thinking about how best to use plants to add a touch of pizzazz to your interior decor, practical considerations are important; not just the growing conditions required by the plant, but the space they will occupy. Plants encroaching onto main routes through a room will inevitably get damaged, and the spiky leaves or irritant sap of some potted plants might even damage the perpetrators of the damage. Plants that loll over soft furnishing may cause stains with dropped leaves or faded blooms.

Problem-solving and cover-ups

No interior is perfect: older properties often have visible pipes, boxing or uneven walls, others may have windows looking out onto a neighbour’s home or the street. Poorly proportioned rooms can lack height, appear too tall or perhaps just too big to be comfortable. Used thoughtfully, plants offer a low-cost, instant solution to these problems and more.

When tackling problems such as pipes stretching up walls, bumpy plaster and things on the walls you would rather hide, you cannot reasonably expect to completely obscure them. Very few indoor plants would be large enough or dense enough. You are looking for something to soften problem areas so they become insignificant. Select a plant with a fair degree of coverage, which is open and has some movement, something to arrest the eye and distract the onlooker from what lies behind. A Weeping fig or palm would be excellent choices. If you are disguising a strong vertical feature such as pipes or boxing, avoid the obvious temptation to choose a strong vertical plant, like Mother-in-law’s Tongue (Sancevieria) for example, since this will only draw attention to the pipes as they emerge from behind the foliage.