Matthews - Houseplants: plants to add style and glamour to your home

Houseplants

Houseplants

Plants to add style and glamour to your home

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 mothers 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.

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.

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 before you head out to the beguiling nursery displays will help sort out some potential candidates.