Catherine Horwood - Potted History: How Houseplants Took Over Our Homes

POTTED HISTORY

How Houseplants
Took Over Our Homes

CATHERINE HORWOOD

IN MEMORY OF RICHARD GILBERT
(1924 2009)

A surprising amount changed in the story of plants in the home since this book first appeared. In just twelve years, indoor plants have become status symbols with proud owners sharing pictures of their green treasures online almost as regularly as their cats, dogs and dinner plates.

What has caused this massive explosion in popularity? Three major factors are involved: improved propagation techniques leading to increased availability and lower prices, the changing lifestyles particularly of millennials, and the phenomenal growth of social media.

The new final chapter of the book looks at all these issues and draws some conclusions on what the future for houseplants might be.

Catherine Horwood

At the start of the seventeenth century, Sir Hugh Platt, a successful horticultural author, published one of the first English books on gardening techniques. It was also the first to include a section on creating a garden within doores.

I hold it for a most delicate and pleasing thing to have a faire gallery, great chamber or other lodging, that openeth fully upon the East or West sun, to be inwardly garnished with sweet hearbs and flowers, yea & fruit if it were possible.

He recommended pots of carnations, rosemary, basil and sweet marjoram to stand loosely upon fair shelves. Their heady scents were used to perfume the early modern home. Platt was not alone in getting pleasure from bringing plants indoors. In 1560, Levinus Lemnius, a visitor to Britain from Holland, had been forced to admit that altho we [the Dutch] do trimme up our parlours with greene boughs, freshe herbes or vine leaves, no nation does it more decently, more trimmely, nor more sightly than they doe in Englande.

The British love gardens and gardening so one might assume that we have always had a passion for houseplants. The truth is that our relationship with plants in the home has fluctuated, sometimes filling our rooms to bursting with greenery or scented plants, then banishing them on the grounds that they are unfashionable or too demanding.

Across the world, for thousands of years, plants have been brought into the home for medicinal use, to cook with, for their scent, or just to admire. From the 3rd century BC, the Egyptians brought plants in clay vessels into inner courts for display. Fifteen hundred years before Christ, Egyptian Queen Hatsepshut grew Somalian frankincense trees in her temple. Terracotta plant pots have been found in the Minoan palace at Knossos on Crete. Roman villas were scented with the blossom of citrus trees.

Throughout medieval Europe cloisters housed tender herbs bred for both medicinal and culinary purposes. The first evidence of the English interest in half-hardy and tender plants is from 1338 when Edward IIIs Queen Philippa was sent plants of rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) from the Continent. In 1392 the Goodman of Paris (Le Mnagier de Paris) wrote that rosemary would not grow from seed in northern Europe but that there was an intriguing method for sending cuttings far away.

You must wrap the aforesaid branches in waxed cloth and sew them up and then smear the parcel outside with honey, and then powder with wheaten flower, and you may send them wheresover you will.

But the history of plants in the English home is far more than just a list of plant introductions. It is interwoven with the stories of brave men who suffered months or years at sea and in unknown and often dangerous new territories to bring back new plant material for the ever more demanding collectors back home. It is the story of scientific curiosity, changing technologies and improved building techniques: how the layouts of houses altered and influenced which plants we could bring into our homes and how they could be displayed. Lighting and heating developments have been bad as well as good news for indoor plants: gas and coal fumes killed thousands of plants in the nineteenth century. Our late twentieth-century obsession with warmth through central heating has been just as damaging.

Just as fashions in garden design influenced which plants were found outside, so changing styles in interior design affected tastes in indoor planting. This was most obvious in grand homes where money was no object and fashions were followed more quickly. Under the Tudors, house designs changed from the dark, draughty baronial hall to a style more familiar to us now. This is when we find the first proof that plants were regularly brought into the home, and particularly the more modest home, which is how most of us live. Medieval coldness was gradually replaced by interior elegance. Later, Georgian minimalism gave way to Victorian clutter, only to be banished in turn by the early twentieth centurys take on classicism. Post-Second World War tastes altered yet again as chain-store furnishing shops offered everyone the chance to buy Scandinavian-inspired designs. As a new century starts, television gardening and home make-over programmes compete to convince us that instant planting can transform our homes.

We are encouraged to think of the garden as another room, with doors opening out on to patios and terraces, conservatories attached to the house, and outdoor windowsills not quite part of the garden and yet best for growing plants that are hardy. For the most part, I have concentrated on the use of plants inside the house since plants in pots in the garden are another story. However, it is often impossible to disentangle the two across the centuries so where the stories cross over I have included them. For example, as domestic heating improved, plants that were originally thought suitable only for the hothouse moved to the conservatory, then into the main rooms of the house. Other plants once thought tender, such as the camellia, moved out into the garden.

So many plants for the home have arrived in Britain over the centuries, it would be impossible to tell the stories of all of them. Some orchids and cacti for example have thousands of varieties and need specialist care; vast books have been devoted to them.

This is not the story of flower arranging that has also been told elsewhere but again it is impossible to look at the history of plants in the home without considering the displays of flowers that often accompanied them. Cut flowers have always been brought into homes, since this is the simplest way of bringing a bit of the garden inside. But, just as potted plants require some skill to grow them successfully, so flower arranging also needs a different sort of artistic flair sometimes highly stylized, sometimes just a question of popping a few flowers into a vase.

Today flowering plants are often treated in the same way as a bunch of flowers and thrown away when they have finished blooming. What a shame! Was it only the Victorians who had the time and enthusiasm to devote to conservatories full of potted plants? Most certainly not: over the centuries, the delight of having what seventeenth-century garden writer Sir Hugh Platt called a garden within doores has captivated many. This is their story.