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Dust off the swiss cheese plant! Indoor plants are trendy again, says helen Billiald
Houseplants are back in vogue so dust off the Swiss cheese plant, says Helen Billiald
For the past three decades houseplants have languished on dining room tables and kitchen windowsills, gathering dust and biding their time. But no longer. Today you can’t browse an interiors magazine or enter a trendy restaurant without noticing there’s a huge amount of potted greenery around. In the curious manner of all trends, it feels as though everyone has had the same bright idea all at the same time. Perhaps this renaissance is due to our lack of outdoor garden space, or a worry over air pollution, or perhaps it’s all part of the retro style revival? Either way, pop down to your local bookshop and you’ll find the trickle of new houseplant books has turned into a publishing tsunami. No longer need we turn to a dog-eared, brown-tinted tome complete with images of lava lamps and people in flares to seek out watering advice. Equally telling has been the horticultural industry’s response. My local garden centre has morphed from offering a single table of orchids and a few poinsettias at Christmas, to a tiered display topped by a mini rainforest with hanging baskets of exciting mouse-tailed cacti and fuzzy-rhizomed hare’s foot ferns. (Hats off to whoever styled it; it’s gorgeous!) Even if you’re not a houseplant aficionado, most of us have a certain fondness for these plants, thanks to a childhood ‘pet cacti’, or African violet. For me it was a spider plant, thrust into my hands by a local nurseryman whose premises smelt of everything that’s good about gardening: a mix of moss and compost, capable of healing your soul. I wish I could tell him what a powerful touchpaper his generosity turned out to be, but his tiny nursery has long since gone. CHIC & CHEERFUL: swiss cheese plants are enjoying a renaissance That spider plant has disappeared too – a victim of student negligence, but not before it reached Olympic heights. It was allowed to grow a waterfall of tresses from a high windowsill in the downstairs loo, almost blocking out the light and turning the room a delicate watery green, until someone trapped its plantlets in the toilet seat and whole lot tumbling into the pan. My excitement with the houseplant revival comes down to the breadth of plants on offer. You’ll still encounter the old favourites such as aspidistra, mother-inlaw’s tongue (Sansevieria trifasciata), Kentia palms (Howea forsteriana) or Swiss cheese plants (Monstera deliciosa), but you may also find the oh-so-trendy fiddle-leaf fig (Ficus lyrata) with its enormous, heavily veined glossy leaves. Watch out too for the succulentstemmed mistletoe cactus (Rhipsalis baccifera), an epiphyte with tresses of strokeable green ‘hair’. Or there’s the simple little round-leaved Chinese money plant (Pilea peperomioides), like a bowlful of spinning plates. Should you be visiting your local garden centre to see what all this fuss is about, may I ask a favour? Would you also pick up a plant for a child you know? Find a little bombproof ‘potted pet’ to keep them company in their bedroom for a while – who knows what gardening spark it might happen to ignite?
“Someone trapped the spider plant in the toilet seat and sent the whole lot tumbling into the pan”
Helen Billiald is a garden writer with a Phd in Ecology and an MSc in Pest Management. She’s currently polishing her ficus leaves