annieb123
Written on Mar 10, 2021
Make Your Own Indoor Garden is a tutorial and style guide to decorating with plants and helping them to thrive indoors. Due out 31st March 2021 from Pen & Sword on their White Owl imprint, it's 112 pages and will be available in paperback format.
This is such a beautifully presented, encouraging, beginner accessible book. The author is upbeat and positive and the book is graphically very appealing and easy to understand. She starts with a few good selections - low maintenance plants which are attractive and can withstand a fair bit of neglect - to begin readers' collections. Further suggestions will expand the readers' home indoor greenery to a modest collection. All of the plants she recommends have many (many) variations in foliage and habit, so a fairly large collection can be built up with just the plants she recommends in the first chapter.
The following chapters contain instructions for terraria (open and closed) and include a fair selection of plants which are suited to both. There's a chapter devoted to cacti and succulents (my favourites), troubleshooting problems and how to avoid many of them, hanging plants (with suggestions for culture and display), kokedama, air plants (tillandsia), propagation, siting your plants, plants and our well being, and improving air quality with plants.
Four stars. There are beautiful photographs on nearly every page. The typeset is good contrast and easy to read. This would be a superlative acquisition for school or public library, for gifting, or for a beginning indoor gardener (especially people who claim they can't succeed with indoor plants).
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes