Back to simplicity and the simple country feel of wood and brick and lots of fresh air. If you prefer Indian rugs, or dhurries, on faxed floors or deep-pile carpet and crisp cotton sheets to satin ones then your plants should look countrified too. Pelargoniums look right whether indoors or out and at one time few cottages didn’t have their pot or two of cheerful flowers on a window-sill. Busy lizzies are another good old-fashioned sort of plant, often badly grown and allowed to get leggy and sparse. They do like plenty of light indoors but not direct sunlight and as they are really very easy to propagate from seed or cuttings there is no reason why you shouldn‘t have a regular supply to fill your window-sills. Read the rest of this entry »

Tranquility

Tranquility is perhaps one of the most difficult atmospheres to create_; it is very much in the mind and the eye of the beholder. In any room, though, greenery will go a long way to making a soothing and tranquil effect. The colour simply cools and quietens its surroundings. Simply filling a room with foliage plants will not necessarily make for a gentle and soothing atmosphere.

Plants can have bold and exciting shapesand dramatic forms of growth. Spiky upward- shooting leaves and branches tend to excite the eye rather than calm it and many plants have confused and busy leaf shapes and patterns to which one’s eye is drawn. Read the rest of this entry »

Dracaena marginata tricolor is a stunningly dramatic plant. It has narrow knife-like leaves, striped green, cream and pink and, as in the yucca, the leaves burst out from the centre of the plant. There is also the species D. marginata which has the foliage clustered at the top of a stem. The croton definitely belongs in this category, but needs some cosseting to really flourish. It needs constant warmth and no chills, plus humidity and plenty of light. Given all this it will reward you with amazing splashes of colour on its broad densely packed leaves. The veining varies from cream through yellow to red according to the individual cultivar. Certain cacti can be very dramatic especially if placed in a situation which makes the most of their extraordinary shapes and weird textures. Read the rest of this entry »

Houseplants are not simply collections of green leaves or flowers and leaves. Each variety has a very definite character, either due to its colour and habit, or because of its associations of place, or the feelings it may give us. Some plants are definitely exotic because of their foreign nature. Others have an aura that is much more difficult to pin down — elegance or flamboyance. These emotive plants can set a sense of style and mood that will give a distinct atmosphere to any room. To help you choose which might suit you, here is a collection of the various characters plants can assume.

Flamboyant

A flamboyant plant is bright, elaborate and draws attention to itself and its surroundings; it cannot be overlooked. It is to be used when a bold stroke is needed and you want to make a strong point. Many flowering plants tend to fall into this category but only a few foliage ones, as flamboyance has more to do with colour than with form. Read the rest of this entry »

Dry Atmosphere

However hard you try some rooms just don’t suit houseplants., They are either too dark, and no plants can do without light, or they are too warm and this is a problem when it goes hand in hand with low humidity. Some of the problem can be eliminated by using electric humidifiers or the water-filled variety that is attached to a radiator. Grouping plants together improves their chances of prospering and maturing. Also standing the pots on a base of pebbles or plunging into peat, which is then kept damp, helps immensely. Alternatively you can give up the struggle with the fine mist sprayer and grow plants which naturally come from arid regions of the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Halls

The biggest problems in an average hall are lack of light and draught. Front doors are sometimes glazed but if not walls often rely on light coming through doorways from other rooms or perhaps from a landing window. If you have a larger than normal hall, and some can be as big as an average room, then you really do need some green plants to cheer up what can be a very gloomy empty space. Draughts can cause difficulties too and, obviously, plants need to be chosen which won’t be damaged or get in the way in what is quite a busy thoroughfare in any house.

There are some plants which will put up with these conditions such as aglaonema or the even tougher aspidistra. But to be more positive, many people have lovely light warm halls with no problem at all where they can grow all manner of different plants. Read the rest of this entry »

Bedrooms

Once upon a time, plants were never seen in a bedroom. They were considered unhealthy and kept strictly downstairs. They would most likely have greatly suffered upstairs in rooms more often than not kept unheated. In these days of central heating, bedrooms are usually heated, though kept cooler than the rest of the house and at a fairly even temperature, and there is often plenty of space to show plants off to advantage. Sometimes a bedroom is the only room cool enough in a house to grow cyclamens or azaleas well. Both are plants which like quitecool conditions. Bedrooms are often the prettiest rooms in a house but commonly forgotten when houseplants are bought. A pale-pink or cream colour scheme for example, or an all-white lacy bedroom needs the contrast of bright green foliage to bring it alive. Bedroom furniture often has large very bland areas of plain colour which need the change of texture and pattern that comes from a foliage plant such as Ficus benjamina or even from a little plant such as Pilea cadierei or Hypoestes phyllostachya. For pure luxury and a sense of hedonism a beautifully scented plant such as a hoya or Jasminum polyanthum or a pot of lilies, or ‘Paperwhite’ narcissi in spring, make spectacular bedroom plants. Read the rest of this entry »

Finding a plant to suit every situation in the house might sound impossible; so few rooms have the perfect environment. If we have a few failures we tend to become discouraged. However there are dozens of plants which are quite happy in extreme conditions from hot and dry to dark and humid and there are many easy plants which are not in the least bit fussy about where they live. Sort out your problem areas and you will find there are plants which will make the most of them.

Bathrooms

Bathrooms seem to be the perfect environment for plants. All that warmth and water splashing about makes us feel that anything growing there will thrive. Also, from the point of view of appearance, foliage plants, in particular, are most effective. Their leaf shapes and textures produce a strong contrast with the smooth monochrome forms of bathroom fittings. Read the rest of this entry »

Starting with rooms which have great atmosphere, the trick is to use plants which work with existing features and not against them. A low-ceilinged, Elizabethan timber-framed house looks entirely wrong filled with palms, monsteras or other tropical plants. Simpler, softer subjects such as pelargoniums, cyclamen, begonias and ivies have much more the right feel and don’t clash with the traditional atmosphere. Similarly a cool high-tech city interior might look very strange with small fussy plants; the scale and simplicity would demand plants which are large and dramatic and make bold statements themselves. This is a case for a beaucarnia or a big Dracaena marginata or an aphelandra, whose marvellous graphic markings remove any chance of it being ignored. Read the rest of this entry »

Every room needs a centre of attraction. It could be a beautiful floor rug or a special piece of furniture or just a stunning colour scheme. But very often a room is lacking just that something to set it off. Plants are the perfect answer for providing a focal point or emphasis — choose the right one and the room comes alive.

One enormous plant, such as a cissus allowed to grow to the ceiling, will create an impression by its sheer size, but it must be well-cared for and always look its best to be successful. A group of plants close together can be as effective and give more scope and choice by enabling you to replace varieties and subtly rearrange the grouping to give more decorative options. Read the rest of this entry »

Plants have a wonderful knack of not just enlivening a room but actually becoming useful decorative devices that make the most of good features or disguise the bad ones. Any room in a house can have things that need highlighting as well as lots of areas that you’d rather not draw too much attention to. Plants can work for you in solving difficult decorating problems and they are cheaper and a lot more fun than getting in the builders.

Many old houses which have seen years of changes and alterations, particularly to plumbing, may have tangles of pipe-work either exposed or badly boxed in. A hanging basket or container with a good easy trailing species such as an ivy or the grape ivy can disguise the ugliest bits and can even be trained along the parts you wish to hide. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of us probably have more things that need hiding in our houses than need showing off but if you think positively about each room and try to find its good points you may be surprised at how many places there are where a plant would really accentuate an attractive feature. A pretty window with perhaps an arched frame or one which has shutters and is too good to hide behind curtains will benefit by having a plant hanging or standing in front of it. Something centrally placed will emphasize the fine proportions and symmetry of a window while a plant standing on either side will focus attention on a pretty or unusual shape, or on a special feature such as little leaded panes or stained glass. Plants near windows also draw the eye beyond into a garden so if your garden is worth more than the occasional glance a strategically placed green plant will lead you outside visually. If you are lucky enough to have a fine fireplace which deserves highlighting, a pair of matching plants flanking it will look spectacular. Read the rest of this entry »

Chives have a milder flavour than onion and a few leaves can be snipped over potatoes or potato salad or added to omelettes to enhance the flavour. Buy a small plant and grow it in a sunny box and it will soon increase in size. In winter it will die back and may perish altogether; if you divide the plant up at the end of summer and pot the small bits individually you will increase your chances of having a survivor. Bring one pot into the kitchen at the beginning of spring to force it into growth for an early supply of leaves.

Sage you will need only infrequently unless you are mad about sage and onion stuffing. It makes an attractive plant, however, if you have the space. There is a purple-leaved variety that is colourful and well flavoured and you may also see a yellow and green one—Salvia officinalis ‘Icterina’—or the variegated white, green and pink form known as ‘Tricolor’, but these are perhaps best grown for decoration rather than flavouring. Sage likes plenty of sun and should be picked over regularly to keep it bushy; replace it when it becomes too gnarled and woody, again from cuttings tucked in beside their mother in the spring. Read the rest of this entry »

Although it is doubtful whether many of the herbs so devotedly grown by herb gardeners are ever used there is no doubt that cooking would be a dull thing without the classic bouquet garni herbs. These and many others are easily raised in a fairly sunny window box and have the edge for immediate accessibility over those grown in the garden. All I would suggest is that you curb your enthusiasm for exotica such as alecost—tall, untidy, invasive and of precious little culinary value—or angelica—a six-footer whose stems can only with difficulty be candied–and use window box space to produce more useful and usable herbs. Read the rest of this entry »

It is fashionable to reel in horror at the thought of gnomes in the garden but it has to be said that children usually love them. They also fall for cement ducks and frogs, for plastic toadstools and windmills and wells, complete with bucket and chain. Disparity of size or materials doesn’t seem to bother children either, so a window sill garden of small shrubs and large gnomes or large shrubs and small gnomes would probably delight its young owner.

It goes without saying that only children who can be trusted to lean out of the window or who are carefully supervised should be allowed a gnome garden box. Your local garden centre will probably reveal a rich source of possible subjects. As with all collections, it is best to have a theme so if the first choice is a jolly gnome with a fishing rod you should give him something to fish in. An old china dish might do, or even a plastic fridge container, as long as the edges can be concealed with small stones or rocks. The bottom could be decorated with gravel, which will support a few marginal plantsfrom the water section in the garden centre or even from a local supplier of tropical fish. These can be rooted in the gravel and, barring accidents, should last a season before succumbing to frost, although some cold-water plants will survive. Read the rest of this entry »

Even more of us are besotted about strawberries and here the process is a good deal simpler. Barrels provided with planting holes, or terracotta planting pots with similarly distributed holes, make a most attractive sight when filled with merrily flowering and then ripening fruit. The plastic planters sold for the purpose are less pleasing to look at in themselves but equally good for growing good clean fruit, while growing bags and boxes can be used for alpine strawberries. These are rather more of a myth than a meal, since they tend to produce too little fruit at one time to satisfy anything but the most elfin appetite. But they are undeniably a treat. Read the rest of this entry »

In the large estates of the past, with their lovely walled kitchen gardens, acres of glass and abundance of labour, fruit was often grown in pots. Even exotics like oranges and lemons were planted in large planters provided with wheels, so that when summer came the trees could be moved out of the orangery into a sunny position in the open. Pineapples and grapes were grown under glass, and great was the pressure on the poor gardeners to provide early fruit for the table.

Today few of us have the time or means for allthis to-ing and fro-ing of pots and, besides, the shops are full of oranges and lemons, grapes and pineapples, usually throughout the year. You could have an orange or a lemon or a grapefruit tree in a pot on the patio and move it to a cool greenhouse or a conservatory during the winter, but even then the most you would be likely to see would be the occasional flower. Still, the plants will come, from pips (pits) sown in pots of moist compost kept close and with bottom heat if possible. In as little as three years you could have a 5 foot tree with attractive dark green shiny leaves. But fruit, no. Read the rest of this entry »

The range of exotic fruit available from supermarkets is increasing all the time. Sometimes the expensive purchase turns out to be a bit of adisappointment, possibly because in our ignorance it is eaten before it is ripe or because, like the fig, it is really only nice when eaten straight off the tree.

Planting the stones, however, can be very rewarding. Children, and adults too for that matter, can plant orange, lemon and grapefruit seeds in pots of moist compost. Lemons are easiest to raise, and then grapefruit, but I have had least success with oranges. All will make shapely shrubs that can be grown in window box or tub; they may even bear sweetly scented white flowers but are highly unlikely to bear fruit. Pomegranate makes first a shrub and then a tree with tiny reddish leaves and in a very hot summer it might even produce flowers, though not fruit. Read the rest of this entry »

Cucumbers have come on a great deal since the old days when they needed expert attention to get anything other than a miserable crop of bitter fruit. There are now all-female varieties that save you the effort of removing the male flowers that produce bitter fruit and there are also bitter-free varieties. Nevertheless, cucumbers are something of a specialist crop. If you feel like trying them, buy ready-grown plants and put them three to a growing bag or singly in pots. The outdoor or ridge varieties are easiest and for a novelty crop you could try to get hold of plants of ‘Crystal Apple‘, which, for some reason or other, produces cucumbers the size, shape and colour of a large lemon. ‘Sweet Success’ is an all-female plant that can be grown out of doors in a container and ‘Patio-Pik’ claims to take up no more room than a cabbage and endure neglect yet still produce more than thirty cucumbers per plant. I haven’t tried it myself but, even allowing for a bit of horticultural hyperbole, it sounds just the thing for the window box gardener. Read the rest of this entry »

In the days when half an acre was regarded as a small garden the idea of growing vegetables in window boxes would have been a huge joke. Today, with our smaller plots and smaller families, the idea is not so laughable. Seedsmen, too, have been working for us to produce dwarfer, tidier plants that can be accommodated in boxes, tubs and other containers. There are, too, the ubiquitous growing bags so that anyone with a fancy for home-grown beans or peppers or tomatoes or other salad crops can easily indulge this. All right, you will hardly have surplusfor freezing but you should be able to enjoy good early pickings. And what a triumph, to be able to serve French beans with a real snap to them, freshly picked from your own window sill. French beans, especially the dwarf varieties that need no staking, are a vegetable particularly suited to container growing. Read the rest of this entry »