Episode 126: houseplant takeover with the RHS Gardening podcast

The Houseplant Takeover at RHS garden Wisley in Surrey. Photograph: Royal Horticultural Society.

The Houseplant Takeover at RHS garden Wisley in Surrey. Photograph: Royal Horticultural Society.

Transcript

Episode 126

[music]

Jane: Episode 126 of On The Ledge podcast is here, but it's not just On The Ledge this week. I'm collaborating with the Royal Horticultural Society, no less. In an absolute first for both On The Ledge and the RHS podcast, we've done a joint episode which will be going out on both feeds. I'm joined by Matthew Pottage who is the curator of the famous RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey in the UK and also a massive house plant fan and Anne Swithinbank who was a guest in my Cactus World Live Show and one of my house plant heroes. We talk about everything from where our house plant careers began to the weird and wonderful things we grow in our homes and we delve into our house plant dreams.

That's coming up shortly but first a small amount of housekeeping. Shoutouts to Amanda and Jade who became Ledge-ends this week by joining my clan of Patreons and to Brennan who became a Superfan, thanks to you, you are a trio of loveliness. Thanks also to Alison and JadesAGem who left lovely reviews for OnTheLedge. JadesAGem says they're enjoying the show because it's nice to have "somewhere to go where others are just as passionate about plants as I am (For some reason, I've not found anyone that wants to obsessively discuss plants all day with me)". I know! What the heck is that about, but anyway, that's what On The Ledge is here for, to give you that outlet so thanks very much for those lovely reviews. If you haven't left a review for On The Ledge yet, I hope you're feeling a slightly guilty feeling right now, so crack on and get it done.

Thanks to Caitlyn from Edinburgh who got in touch about my episode with Maya Thomas, that was number 124, and Caitlyn says they were "filled with absolute joy" by my description of plant glasses. Caitlyn writes: "My mum is incredible plant person but I never had the bug growing up. She would always point out plants on walks or round the garden and I would always roll my eyes in boredom. That is until earlier this year, when I unexpectedly fell in love with houseplants. Now I see the world so differently. Listening to your podcasts and learning so much allowed me to develop my own plant glasses and these days I'm obsessed. My plant glasses let me see plants and learn more about them everywhere I go." Well, I think it can't be long before a chain of opticians gets me in to design plant glasses. How cool would that be? What would they be like? Would they be shaped like Monstera leaves? I don't know, but yes, I'll start working on a design I think.

[music]

Jane: Enough of making a spectacle of myself, it's time to hear from Matthew Pottage and Anne Swithinbank. We get through a lot of plant names in this, so as always, check out the show notes at JanePerrone.com if you want to get the whole picture of the plants we're talking about. Okay, are you ready? Let's go.

[music]

Matthew: Welcome to the RHS podcast house plant special, my name is Matthew Pottage and I'm the curator of RHS Garden Wisley and I absolutely love houseplants. I think I've mentioned them a few times on here before. For a very, very special one-off episode I'm joined by, I want to call them the queens of house plants, Anne Swithinbank from Gardener's Question Time and Jane Perrone from On The Ledge and we're going to have a bit of a geek-out talking about houseplants. This is the first of its kind, I'm going to call it a podcast swap, Jane. Over to you first. Can you explain to us about On The Ledge and how that's going to merge with the RHS podcast today?

Jane: Well, it's a wonderful opportunity to have our listeners listen to another podcast and my podcast is a weekly podcast about houseplants that I've been making since February 2017. It's basically my excuse to talk about houseplants because nobody else in my family is interested in hearing me warble on.

Matthew: You've got to talk to somebody!

Jane: So I just decided to start a podcast to provide an outlet for my conversations and also just as a way of being able to email somebody and say: "Do you want to have a chat with me about gesneriads?" and actually have a reason to do it, which is putting it out on the podcast. It's just a personal passion that's turned into a bit of an ongoing thing and I have great fun making it. It's also become a really nice community of listeners around the world - it's great.

Matthew: It's really, really good. Anne, there's a current trend in houseplants right now but you've been a stalwart and a real champion of houseplants for, I want to say for years, but you're now pulling faces at me! Tens of years?

Anne: It is years, because I started to grow them when I was very young and obviously I think I became known as houseplant lady because of being at Wisley, looking at the previous glass houses as glass house supervisor and then subsequently going onto Gardeners' World when Geoff Hamilton was the presenter and going up to Rutland where he lived. He really wasn't interested in houseplants so he was really, really happy for me to take that over. I guess that's where I got the title of houseplant lady or houseplant queen.

Matthew: So we are going to start our journey into house plants, I asked you to do some homework and I can see you've absolutely followed the request, we've got some beautiful plant material on the table and some very nice photographs on here. So can you tell me, or can we talk a bit about, a plant that inspired your interest in indoor plants? Hopefully we'll see some images of it.

Jane: I haven't got an image of my one because this is just in my brain, but the one I wanted to talk about was in my doctor's surgery as a kid and, I don't know if you remember, there used to be, this is way back, and they used to have those coloured lights and the light for your doctor would light up and it would go "beep" and you would be called in and you would put your number up. Right next to that was this huge swiss cheese plant, Monstera deliciosa, which is so trendy now but this was back in the day, late 1970s, and it was just huge and it was going everywhere and there were roots all over the place and I don't think it got watered or repotted more than once in a blue moon. I remember sitting there waiting for my doctor's appointment just looking at this plant and going: "What is it? What the hell is that? Where has that come from? Why is that in here?" and that sparked the fascination for me. It took me quite a few years to get my first swiss cheese plant but it was something that sparked off that interest in indoor plants.

Matthew: You do see them in waiting rooms. I remember them in the hospital foyer in my home town because they would normally grow up trees and be scaling up any kind of structure. They don't need massive pots, do they? So they can get enormous plants with a small pot, roots everywhere and as long as they've got a corner to lean up to or something, they just keep going, and if they've got the ceiling room the leaves get bigger and bigger and bigger and it's fascinating.

Jane: I do wonder whether a lot of people who are buying these plants now, and they're buying them as dinky, two foot tall, have any conception of what they're letting themselves in for if they have this plant long term because they can get mysteriously large, which is wonderful. They're fantastic plants.

Anne: That's what's great about plants, you get the small cutting or you get the small plant that's just come in fresh and it's the character that it forms as it grows older that really fascinates me.

Matthew: Yes and they get so character-full. How about you Anne, what was your early memory or inspired houseplant?

Anne: Back in the '60s when I started to collect houseplants - that does make me sound very old doesn't it? - most of them came to me as small pieces of succulents, cacti, pelargoniums, Busy Lizzies, from other people's windowsills or they would hand me plants that they had bought and had nearly died. That's how all my plants came to me. I've brought along a picture of the candle cactus and you can see why it's called the candle cactus because it's got all these candle-like sections. It's a plant I still keep now. It's not a very pretty plant, it grows in the winter and my family absolutely love the plant we have. They always get it down at Christmas time from my windowsill because it's very celebratory. It produces little flowers on long stalks that are like groundsel and they turn into dandelions. Samantha, who is nearly 30, says to me: "We need to get the dandelion plant down, I love it, it looks like it's waving its dandelions." It's like a Christmas decoration that has to come down in the middle of winter and joins us in the sitting room for a few weeks then it has to go back upstairs again. So I still grow it. But that, to me, it takes me right back. Things like the Mexican Hat plants, they were the sorts of things that circulated because we didn't have many places to go and buy them. In a funny sort of way, garden centres en masse hadn't been invented back then, it was florist shops and people's private collections.

Matthew: Trying to cast my mind back to early memory, I spent a lot of time with my grandma who had a big collection of pelargoniums and I was never, as a kid, that taken by lots of smelly leaves and all the red and pink flowers. She grew them for the flowers and they weren't very appealing to me. I do remember this high-up shelf in her greenhouse with these cacti on and there was one cactus that I was particularly drawn to that I thought looked completely different from all the others. Eventually, years down the line, when she passed away I managed to get hold of this cactus which I identified as Ferocactus emoryi and it always reminded me of her. It wasn't in a very good state, it was nearly brown all the way up and eventually I lost it - I was still quite a young kid at the time. But then I came across one a few years ago in a garden centre, it was in a mixed cactus tray, I was so delighted to see it again and I thought I will have that on my office windowsill at work because it was grandma that got me into plants and that will just be a little bit of my childhood memory. So I wasn't going to bring it in on the tube because it's quite a fierce thing - there's an image of it. I'm sure you've seen them before, but that lovely red spine and quite a blue grey body to it. I prefer succulents to cacti and I'm not into cacti that have loads and loads of masses of smaller spines but something like that with the big fat red spines that are quite sparse, I don't know, I just find that quite visually appealing.

Anne: It's striking, isn't it?

Matthew: Yes. You only need to walk into it a couple of times. My mum would never have wanted it in the house when I was younger, grandma's one, because up north people have net curtains everywhere, it'd cause terrible problems with the nets, it'd be stuck on everything, but down south it's fine because net curtains are illegal. It sits very happily on the windowsill and looks quite cool.

Anne: Talking about pelargoniums, I have brought a couple of bits because these are the ones that I make my famous pelargonium cake from.

Matthew: That is a nice one.

Anne: This is the easiest to accommodate because here we have Crispum variegatum which has tiny little leaves and it's lemon-scented and quite dainty really.

Matthew: It's really dainty. I think if somebody saw that they would think: "That's not a pelargonium, right?" Because it is different, in a sense is good.

Anne: What we do is crystallise the leaves and use them on top of the cake as decoration. The one that makes the scents, or if you like, the flavour inside the cake is Radula and that's this one that's rose and you can put that in the sugar and you can put that in the flour and you can bake the leaf into the cake and take it out before you ice it and it flavours it.

Matthew: Of course the cake is sitting in your bag down there for us to try?

Anne: Sometimes I do that but I haven't done it this time, sorry.

Matthew: I look forward to sampling it - it sounds very, very good.

Anne: One day.

Matthew: So houseplants have really undergone a resurgence in popularity of late. Was your interest always fashionable? I'm looking over to you Anne because I guess in the '60s when you started, was it?

Anne: No, I was considered very odd. For a small child and then a growing up, a teenager to be interested in plants, and a school-age child, was considered very eccentric. I was very interested in horses as well and the natural world. Everybody said to my mother: "Oh, she'll grow out of it, don't worry, and when she grows up she'll be into boys and fashion and music and she'll grow out of it," but I never did, of course. It just got worse. I just collected more and more and more. You can do all the other stuff as well but you've got to keep your plants going. Then, of course, there was that awful slump somewhere in the middle of the 1990s and certainly by the time we had Ground Force, everybody was suddenly looking at their little gardens and outdoor rooms and got very involved creating them instantly and buying trendy plants in pots and putting them in their gardens. They seemed to forget about the indoor plants. I think if you're fascinated by the plants themselves and their characters and their origins, you'll never lose it. If you're using them to decorate your house, then it could come in and out of fashion. But if they are a real obsession, which the three of us can understand very well, then I think it will always be with you, it won't leave you.

Matthew: I like to think of it as all of us have been bitten by the bug at the moment. As you say there will be a percentage that will move on, but there will also be a percentage that I think will actually become quite attached to their plants. Once you've had a plant for more than a few years, it really becomes part of the furniture, part of the house, and you see it flower and you see it grow. Then it just becomes something that you don't just chuck out like a bunch of flowers. How about you, Jane?

Jane: Like Anne, I was into plants from a very young age. I guess quite luckily for me, the slump in houseplants in the 90s coincided with me being at university and then doing a Master's degree in the US. That was a time when I didn't really have many plants anyway because I was moving around and not in a permanent residence. Although there is a hilarious picture of me as a student, which I don't remember at all, but a picture of me with my housemates and we've all got spider plants on our heads, so there must have been some plants in the house at some point. As soon as I got my own place and started to become more settled then, yes, the plants immediately came back in again. In the last few years I just got more and more as things have been easier to get hold of apart from anything else. As a child I used to buy a lot of plants or be given a lot of plants and also jumble sales, I got a lot of plants from jumble sales and added to my collection that way. Obviously, now, it's gone a lot more upscaled, we've got boutiques opening in every town and city selling houseplants. I also got into trying to grow houseplants from seeds which is great fun as well. I try to do that on the podcast every year and encourage people to give that a try because that's a really interesting experiment to get to know plants better.

Matthew: I can imagine. Just casting our minds back to when things weren't so fashionable, I agree, you went anywhere where there may be houseplants and you'd be looking for something slightly more unusual or different and then you'd always have a few staples, there would always be a Howea palm, a yucca and a rubber plant, but now, because there is so much fashion and so much spent in the houseplant sector, almost any good nursery you go in to, there's all manner of things. Every time I go into the Wisley plant centre, there's another new mother in law's tongue that I've not seen and I don't have and I just thought: "I can't keep collecting these" because I could just fill every office room in the building I'm in at Wisley and my own house with mother in law's tongues now, and there's more and more appearing. It's exciting but at the same time it's like: "Wow, you could be inundated."

Jane: Those fleshy succulent plants. I can see why they're very attractive and the reason I'm always banging on, and you've got it, this is why I'm looking at you in a very annoyed way, Bantel's Sensation and you've got a photo of it and you're going to torture me with it. This is the snake plant, Sansevieria Bantel's Sensation, which is impossible to get, apart from stealing it from Matthew Pottage. It's impossible to get in the UK. The nearest I've seen is an online shop in Poland has got some. It's very common in the US. It's this very thin-leaved snake plant with silvery markings and stripes and it's very attractive. Matthew, perhaps you can tell us more. You've got one, but I love this plant.

Matthew: It's really cool and I do like it because of the pure white variegation and there's some areas where it produces all areas of white and you do get a bit of dead tissue as you can see there, but generally it's a really nice, well-behaved plant.

Jane: When are we getting some in the Wisley plant centre for me to come and buy?

Matthew: Yes, I know, and everyone's going to be asking that after this as well and the buyer won't be thanking me. It's really, really slow. I got this years ago and I used to go to the Woking Cacti and Succulent Society meetings, of course I did, on a Saturday night, and it was in the raffle and there was a lady there that was into her Sansevierias and it was just a small piece. That's where I picked up quite a few unusual succulents, where now people say to me: "Where would I get that?" and I literally don't have an answer.

Anne: The British Cacti and Succulents Society would be a good starting point.

Matthew: Yes, wouldn't it just. That's where you have a lot of specialist collections and those people are normally very generous. Sometimes something might be rare but it might not always be slow-growing like this particular Sansevieria and sometimes when you've got something it bulks up quite quick and then you're happy to share it around but it's just not about much. So those specialist clubs are brilliant for material sharing.

Jane: It's interesting with that Bantel's Sensation because this is another plant that was fashionable in the '70s.

Anne: Very fashionable.

Jane: When I went to a tour of some Dutch nursery glasshouses, there was a Sansevieria growing and they had one specimen of that and I said: "Can I have it please?" and they're like: "No," and I said: "What happened to all this plant material?" and they said as these plants faded in popularity, snake plants and Sansevierias became less popular, all this plant material was lost apart from a few people who were still keeping the faith. They're the ones now who've got this amazing resource which is in demand.

Matthew: We mentioned about fashions and the snake plant or the Sansevieria being massive in the '70s. Just trying to map out some of the fashion moments with houseplants over the last few decades. So, Sansevierias were massive. Rubber plants seemed to be quite big then, didn't they?

Anne: They were and a variety of Ficus, the weeping fig, was too, and variegated forms of the rubber plants. Then also things like the banyan Ficus benghalensis that used to crop up especially in park's department nurseries. All of them grow into huge trees in the wild, they want to get big, but they're quite happy to stay in pots too. We used to have great fun air-layering them for people. I remember, on Gardener's World, going to the house of someone who, I think they'd written in to me when I used to write for the News of the World, and they'd said: "Our house is being overtaken by this massive rubber plant. We love it and we don't know what to do. Can we prune it? Help!" So we went along with the cameras and I decided to air-layer it for them. So I was tracing the stem tips back by about eighteen inches or so and making a cut, damage the stem, putting some Sphagnum moss, I think it was in those days, that you could use moist compost and just a little bag around it, tied at each side, so it had its own little rooting medium at the right part of the plant. So we said: "We'll do several of these and we'll just leave it and we'll come back in about two months and hopefully roots will have formed, in the meantime if you could squirt a little bit of water in the bag to make sure it doesn't dry out," so we went back and they had all rooted and so we cut them off and we potted them and we gave them three or four youngsters that had all rooted beautifully. Lovely story! Then I said: "Right, now you have these young ones you must grow them on and then you can keep one of them and it's really grown strongly, give the others away and then use it to replace your old big plant." I looked at their faces and I thought: "They're not going to do it." They're just going to grow these as well and I'd just compounded their problem. I should imagine that somewhere in the Midlands there's this house, totally... there'll be little husks of people inside.

Matthew: The Strangler Fig! You needed to go back in another two months' time, when they weren't there!

Anne: To supervise.

Matthew: Saw the old one off at pot-level and throw it out on the compost heap.

Anne: I think this is what people often don't get. It is the same plant, it's the same clone, it is exactly the same plant. When these big things get too big, you can propagate them, you can prune them and it's fine, you can do it.

Matthew: I also think when you have a lot of house plants at home, you don't always want it to be the dead and dying museum, or the hospital windowsill, and I must admit I'm quite ruthless. If something doesn't look great, or this just really isn't doing it for me any more, or it's got red spider mite, I don't fiddle around and have a special hospital corner. I do just throw things on the compost heap. I'm looking at them every day as well and I want to get enjoyment. I don't want to be: "I rescued that from outside the shop, and that got frosted, this always had this problem with it, that got knocked off by the dog but it's going to grow back in two years' time." It's just like, enjoy life!

Jane: I think it's a British thing. I think on the continent there is more of an attitude like that. In Britain, people email me in two categories. Category one is; "My plant is a bit poorly, can you help?" and you look at the picture and it's a dead stick. Just throw it away! The other one is their plant is looking amazing and it's got one slightly damaged leaf and they're like: "Oh my gosh, my plant is going to die!" and you're like: "Well, no, it doesn't always look perfect. You are going to get some yellowing leaves particularly at the bottom, as long as it's not all the leaves." So there's this double thing that goes on where people hang on to things way beyond where they should, but also panic when normal things that are just part of the cycle of life happen as well.

Anne: If you saw these plants growing in the wild they would be far from perfect. Animals will have taken chunks out of them and things fall on them. They go through droughts, so they're not perfect there.

Matthew: Okay, so we've done a bit of a trip down memory lane and talked about what was fashionable years ago. What is your current favourite? What's really exciting you at the moment on your windowsill? Anne over to you, first.

Anne: I'm taking this as a literal question. It's not exciting me generally, because if I was going to go out with a shopping list, it might be different plants. Just looking around my own collection, what am I really looking at every day and thinking: "I love you." I think first of all, I'm going to go for Cymbidium and I have a photograph here, one of my Cymbidiums producing its flower buds and I think this is almost more exciting than when they open. Obviously, the flowers of a Cymbidium orchid are very beautiful but that moment when they produce the bud to show that they're going to flower, to me, is the most exciting point. They're not the easiest of plants to accommodate because they like fairly cool conditions, so they don't like hot, central-heated rooms and they produce quite a lot of tall, grassy foliage, I suppose. You can put them outside for the summer and, in fact, if you let them feel a little bit of chill in the autumn that is supposed to help them come in and bud up. The secret, really, is to give them the space in their pot for their pseudobulbs, which are those bulb-like structures at the base that they produce to grow their leaves from to get a sufficient size to support a flower bud. So a bit of repotting now and again will do that. Also, some liquid feeds. Liquid fertiliser in the summer, a bit of high potash to keep them going. If you do that, they will flower very well for you and they're very easy orchids to grow. When you have one in flower and you're displaying it, say on a hall table, your whole house just gets transformed. It makes me feel like I live in a palace.

Matthew: Oh, it feels like some Victorian Palace. Tahey just have a class about them.

Anne: They have a class, that's right. So there's that.

Matthew: If you have a cooler house, it's a great orchid, isn't it?

Anne: Which I do. I can't grow things like caladiums and anthuriums they just find it too cold in the night. The temperatures are dropping right down and our house is a very chilly and badly insulated house, so we tend not to run the heating that much. For cool plants, it's perfect, which is why I've also got a citrus. I've got a lime.

Matthew: Fruity one, at that.

Anne: Yes, with quite nice green leaves. They require not too cold a winter. If you get them too cold, they'll stay alive but they go so dormant that they don't really grow and they're very slow to warm up and come into growth and they have to really start again every year. But by the other side they don't want to be too hot either, so a normal central-heated room is probably not for them, they'll get too hot and dry. But if you can get it just right, like the temperature in my office, they will remain healthy if you give them some high nitrogen feed in the summer and a general purpose feed in the winter just to keep them ticking over. This is a lime which I find the easiest to grow. Our heated lime, really good, almost always producing flowers which are scented or fruits and then when the fruits are ready, perfect for your gin and tonic.

Matthew: I think your feeding regime is interesting there because how often on GQT do we get: "I have an orange, I have a lemon, a lime, and it's got interveinal chlorosis" - i.e. - the leaves are looking yellow? And they're always starved of something aren't they? If I've got any criticism of the citrus plants, it can be they look really miserable if the potting mix isn't right or the feeding regime is not as it should be.

Anne: Tap water as well, I think we had a special on it on GQT fairly recently and it was drummed into us again that if you've got hard tap water then you probably need ericaceous compost. If your tap water is quite soft, then a fairly neutral compost would be fine, so you have to think about that.

Matthew: It looks like a cracking example. How about you, Jane?

Jane: I'm not a great Begonia grower. I've killed a lot of Begonias over the years. There is one Begonia that has done really well for me and has turned into a bit of a monster and it's the Beefsteak Begonia, and I want to get the Latin right here, I think it's Begonia erythrophylla. It lives up to its name really. It's got these huge, chunky succulent leaves, it's a rhizomatous Begonia and it also produces really nice flowers. So, right now...

Matthew: Are those rhizomes the big, thick creeping stems almost at pot level, aren't they?

Jane: Exactly. It's doing its thing now, in flower, and the flowers are really quite lovely.

Matthew: The flowers are enormous and look at the underside of the leaf.

Jane: That's slightly a weird position to photograph it from because I'm looking down on it, but the flowers are a good 50cm tall, so it's really quite a dramatic plant. The strangest thing about this, and you can't see at all what it's planted into, but it's planted into a melamine salad bowl with no drainage.

Matthew: Of course it is.

Jane: I am whacking on all the time on my podcast about drainage, drainage, drainage, but actually there are occasions when things just strangely work without drainage.

Matthew: I'm a big fan of novel containers and I never want drainage holes because I don't want to mess the floor or the furniture, it's just about careful watering.

Anne: Don't put too much in is the basis of it.

Matthew: Yes, but that Begonia has got a lovely glossy dark leaf, the underside is absolutely pillar box red. It's gorgeous. Really beautiful.

Jane: It's a really good one. It just came as a little plug plant from Dibleys Nursery in North Wales, who are big Begonia growers and, as I say, most Begonias don't last more than a year with me because I find Rex Begonias tricky, but this I find really easy. I think because it likes the fact, because I grow a lot of cacti, succulents and Hoyas, that I don't water a lot. I think it likes the fact it doesn't get too much water and with those rhizomes it's probably just storing its resources in there and is relatively happy. That's probably about two or three years old from being a tiny plug plant, so it has been good value.

Matthew: Of course, if you want to see some of these pictures we're discussing and our plants at home we will be uploading these online so you can have a look. So if you head to rhs.org.uk/podcast there will be a link there and of course to Jane's On The Ledge podcast too. You can share photos showing off your own stunning indoor displays, swap ideas or even ask our advice about your poorly or sick plants that are struggling. Thoughts, comments, photos, share them with us via Twitter or you can join in the conversations on Facebook or Instagram. Find us @the_rhs and if you can tag them #rhspodcast we'll be able to find your post even quicker. My current favourite of the moment, have either of you ladies seen this before?

Jane: Yes, I have. In fact I saw it yesterday, at Edinburgh Botanic Gardens. We were rushing through this glasshouse and I was going: "No, I've got to go and see that plant," and we didn't have time. I can never remember the Latin name. I think it might have changed.

Matthew: It has, it's now Huperzia squarrosa but I think it was Lycopodium and Club Moss is its common name, even though it's a not a true moss but it's known as one of the club mosses. It's a strange, trailing... I think I'm attracted to it because I like monkey puzzle trees - it looks a bit conifer-like. It also looks like a giant moss.

Jane: I think it looks like something out of Dr Seuss. Something you'd see in a Dr Seuss book.

Anne: I want one. Do you want one?

Jane: Yes, I do want one. I've heard it's quite hard though, Matthew. I heard it's a little bit tricksy.

Matthew: I heard that too and I first saw it in James Wong's living room up on this shelf, out of the way of the window. I was like: "What's that doing there? You've just put that there for my visit!" because I heard these are a nightmare to grow." He's like: "No, they're really not that hard. Just grow it in like an orchid bark mix, it needs to be quite free draining and it can dry out between waterings, and there's little else to it." I thought okay, one day, if I ever come across one... Then at the Wisley flower show, a chap selling air plants had a few of these on his stand and I was like: "Okay, this was meant to be!" Two years later, in a little hanging pot in my office window, north-facing window, it's actually above a radiator which it doesn't seem to be bothered about at all and I've put it in an orchid bark mix.

Jane: We should warn people though, this is quite hard to get hold of. I've had at least two listeners who have been contacting me going: "Where can I get this plant? I can't find it anywhere" and I haven't been able to track it down anywhere, so it's another one that you have to go to a specialist plant show. At the moment the Instagram effect is kicking in for this plant and lots of people are seeking it. The nursery trade isn't able to react immediately to these spikes in demand in the way that perhaps other industries can move a little bit faster.

Anne: I think that's what makes it so wonderful when you finally get one, isn't it? When you really want it, you find it. If it was easy to get one, you could just go down the road, it wouldn't be quite so amazing.

Matthew: Exactly.

Anne: How would you propagate that then?

Matthew: No idea, absolutely no idea. It looks like something that could maybe root from a tip cutting. There was a bit of mangled stem in it when I got it and I trimmed it back to try and tidy it up, this one stem, and it really didn't like that. It literally died back in a matter of weeks back to the base. So I was like: "I won't be doing that again."

Anne: Spores then? Would it be from spores?

Matthew: Yes, well I guess it would produce that, but also it produces stems right from the base and it's forming a bit of a crown in the pot. So, I guess, with an older plant, you might be able to split it and divide it as long as you can get root on it, but it's something I've not really dared to do anything further with. I think throughout a flower show or plant sale and there's a specialist there with epiphytes or air plants or with it being an epiphytic thing, it's worth a look. So we've got our cool plant selections and things that we're into at the moment, how about displaying them and arranging them around the house? Pots on a windowsill? Everyone's been doing that for a long time. I decided to pull out the seat of an old chair and plant up a chair which I have in my living room. Any oddities you guys have tried or things you've seen that you like or don't like?

Jane: I find that I'm going into this deep dive into Instagram, which drives me a little bit nuts because you see so many things that you think: "I would love to do that, but I'm never going to do that or make that elaborate display!" I'm quite terrified of hanging plants, not only just the lack of DIY skills that makes me think they're going to end up on my head, smashing down, but also I find it really difficult to remember to water stuff that's hanging up and inaccessible. So I go down this rabbit hole of looking at Instagram and coming up with all these great ideas and realising it's easier to stick with what I've got. That said, the one thing I would really push, and you can't really see it in this picture but it is true that combinations of different plants in the same pot can be quite fun and a good way of experimenting. So also in this begonia beefsteak there is pussy ears which has been taken over but it was a nice idea when it started to have these furry leaves of that plant trailing with the begonia. You can just try those different combinations, I think. It's really fun to see what works, having ground cover underneath, or perhaps Dracaena marginata mixing together even different colours of something like that Fittonia, the nerve plant, that comes in different colours. You could make a really fun terrarium, or something like that.

Matthew: I never like to see compost or any growing medium in the top of a pot, so have something low-growing, like Fittonia, or I like to mulch with pine cones or every so often when I clean my Trachycarpus outside, all that coir that comes off the stem, that's actually really nice to mulch the top of a pot rather than looking at compost. How about you, Anne, do you have a full-planted tea service?

Anne: No, I have used little tea cups for putting air plants in and fill them with some pebbles or some shells and just balance the air plant in there, it looks quite neat. I have tried putting things together into bigger containers but I generally find I get the balance wrong and I'll put something like a Maranta in there, a prayer plant type, and it would take over and squeeze everything else out. I think the most fun I have with plants is probably where it's not exactly inside the house, it's a porch, where somebody has fitted some old kitchen top units along one side and so that gives me the ability to do a bit of staging. Staging is something we used to go for a lot in the old Wisley glasshouse, probably less so in the one you have now, because we used to have lots of benches that were gravelled. You could do all sorts of wonderful arrangements of plants, so they all juxtaposed, and sometimes you'd raise some up at the back by standing them on upturned pots and you get all the shapes and sizes together and I really enjoyed doing that in there. Also, it helps you, when you're constantly rearranging them, to dead leaf them and look for pests and just check them over and get them so that they're all sitting nicely with each other and they're all very happy living cheek by jowl. So that's quite nice. So I get what you're saying about not having bare tops. It's quite nice to grow things in there.

Matthew: When you're talking about your staging, it's about bringing things close together and they set each other off and you don't have gaps, you don't see pots, it can look like a big, full-on display.

Anne: It's not so easy to do inside the house, that's more something for a conservatory or a porch or you can set up a surface.

Matthew: Where you've got a bit more space?

Anne: Yes.

Matthew: Speaking of the Wisley glasshouse and what you remember and what you think we might not do or do. We have quite a wacky display coming up that we're calling The Giant Houseplant Takeover. Which, in our temperate house, we're building a small house, you'll be able to walk in through the front doors, walk through the hallways, into the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen and it will be like the inhabitants left the house years ago and the plants are literally taking over. So there will be plants growing out of the furniture, we've got a four poster bed which has these living pineapple finials that were being planted the other day when I walked through. We've got this gallery on one of the walls of all succulents planted up in picture frames. It's so cool and fun. The team are having a lot of fun with it. There's a big chess board and all the chess pieces are actual, small cacti. So just to really get people further inspired by houseplants and thinking outside of the box a little bit. It's certainly not like the old school, tiered displays of the old glasshouse, which I remember the trailing ivy on the benches and things lined up beautifully in pots all grown to the same quality. We do still do a bit of that, and it's fun. It's great there's no right or wrong with it. It's just a different way of doing something. There was also a huge Stag's Horn Fern being lowered into a bath the other day when I walked through. So there's loads of really cool things and it's quite light-hearted and that's running through the entire month of February, so do check that out in the glasshouse.

Jane: I'm really looking forward to seeing that. I'm going to get all over-excited as usual and bounce around looking at that. I'm very excited. I think it's going to be interesting to see whether you get a different clientele, a different type of visitor coming to that. I know when I went to the houseplant festival at the Garden Museum last year, it was like a rock concert. There were people queuing up for two hours to get into that event. It made me realise just how much this current houseplant trend is drawing in a whole new generation of people. I'm sure it'll be popular.

Matthew: I keep noticing on the local bus, where I am in Fulham, there is a garden centre just down the road, there's so many people in their 20s carrying variegated rubber plants, palms, yuccas, literally armfuls of house plants in and out of that garden centre. It's great.

Anne: Is this house your particular brainchild?

Matthew: No, it came up through the glasshouse team actually.

Anne: Did it? Good for them.

Matthew: We always have a winter event of some description in the glasshouse. We like to mix it up. We've done tropical butterflies, we've had Lego sculptures and this evolved. One of the team was talking about having a giant terrarium and bit by bit we've got to the idea of having this house. They've gone from doing these poinsettia towers for the Christmas displays, now into planting picture frames, moving baths around, going antique shopping. It's really, really good fun.

Anne: It sounds amazing.

Matthew: It's one of those things that I think maybe an old school perception of the RHS might be quite stuffy and serious, but at the same time, it's evolved so much and we can still have really great horticulture and good houseplants and it can be a bit more tongue in cheek. That opens on the 25th January and runs until 1st March. The full opening times of the glasshouse and the garden can be found on the website. So, moving along to plant problems and expert solutions. What are the current plants and problems that are bothering your listeners on both GQT and On The Ledge? Over to Jane.

Jane: I think I said earlier about there's always the question about: "What do I do about this dead stick?" which is a fairly simple answer. One of the things that's coming up a lot is where do I get this rare plant that everyone's after and I've seen on Instagram that I must have? When you say: "You can't get it" they can't quite compute that because it's the internet. Surely you can just click on a button?

Matthew: Surely you go to Amazon and can get everything tomorrow, right? What's the problem?

Jane: Yes. There's this lack of understanding sometimes, or just awareness of the lead times that the nurseries are working to. It was the case a few years ago with the Chinese money plant, the pancake plant, however you like to describe it. Pilea peperomioides, suddenly went through this explosion of interest.

Matthew: It did, didn't it? Massive, yes.

Jane: I had people on the show saying they were paying $50 for a little tiny plant. Now, everywhere has caught up, it's being sold mass-produced at places like IKEA, and Trader Joe's in the US, which is one of those mass sellers. The demand is being met by the supply but sometimes people can't accept a slow-growing plant like that Bantel's Sensation - it's going to take an awfully long time for the supply and demand to be equalised, if that makes sense?

Matthew: How about at GQT, Anne? What's a regular houseplant conundrum?

Anne: Mealybug turns up quite often. People don't always know what it is and they sometimes mistake it and they think they've got something like woolly aphid on their house plants. My heart always sinks because it's not an easy solution, is it? Sometimes you can prune out quite a lot of the mealybug infested growth and try and treat the remainder. It's a little bug that looks like a small, how would you describe it?

Matthew: A small woodlouse.

Anne: A woodlouse a pinky white colour and it surrounds itself with this fuzzy mealy white material. Small ones creep around and eventually you see these white blobs on your plants and they're sucking sap and also flicking honey dew onto lower leaves so they're beginning to turn black with the growth of sooty mould. So it's not a great thing to have and sometimes it's better to just cut your losses and get rid of the infected plants and start again. If you have a really, really lovely house plant collection and some plants, like Stapeliads I'm interested in that are very prone to it, and you bring in a new plant, it's often best to put it in quarantine because within a two-month period that could actually spout something nasty like that would run through your entire rest of the collection.

Matthew: That's such a good tip. With mealybug, people often say: "Where did the pest come from?" and then normally it's chances are, it had it. You either didn't notice or it was at a very low level. Like you say, two months down the line, suddenly it erupts and once you have it, it is just a menace.

Anne: It's difficult to get rid of. You can try spraying at it with some of these less toxic sprays and some of them will work if you keep at it because you have to spray to break down the coating and then again to actually kill the bug. The eggs always seem to hatch out and you have to keep watching and looking. Then you can also get a biological control which is a sort of ladybird like creature but it's not very efficient.

Matthew: Okay, so to wrap up our houseplant special, I wanted to ask you about future plants, blue sky plant thinking. If money, or location, or rarity, or anything and everything was available to you, what would your ideal dream plant, or plant combination, be? Surely a sea of Bantel's Sensation, Jane?

Jane: Obviously, yes. It's a difficult one because there's so many options here. One of the options I was thinking of, have you seen that sky scraper in Italy? I think it's called the Bosco Verticale? The sky scraper with all the trees on the balconies?

Matthew: Yes.

Jane: I would like one of those with trees everywhere and stuff inside, wouldn't that be amazing to live in one of those apartments. The other option, I think, would just be a really modern greenhouse, or two really modern greenhouses. One as my front of house, where I theoretically relax with my absolutely tiptop house plants, and then another one for production. I'm imagining it looks like, have you ever been to that glasshouse, the Bombay Sapphire glasshouse?

Matthew: I've seen pictures, yes.

Jane: I'm thinking it might look something like that. I'm thinking of two of those or perhaps a more traditional greenhouse for the back of house, then a fancy one and I can flit between the two.

Matthew: It sounds like a whole glasshouse complex. It sounds beautiful.

Jane: It would have to be separate from my house so that I can hide away and my family couldn't find me.

Matthew: Yes, hideaway, that sounds very good. And Anne? You've got some artistic drawings.

Anne: Yes, but I think we're on the same page. Having been warned about this question and having had a three-hour train trip up from Devon, I was able to do a little sketch. I didn't know what to sketch, I just thought I'd let my imagination flow. I started off drawing my office as it is, which is quite good. Cleared out and decorated, it would be quite good because it already is like a private space outside in the garden, in an old wooden building that's tumbling down a bit. So I sketched the bench and there's a little tripod with a huge Phlebodium aureum which is a Golden Polypodium Fern and loads of rhizomes sticking out from it. Then I added a Platycerium stag horn fernon the wall and then I moved 'round and instead of all the rubbish that's all over the furniture, I cleared all that away in my mind and made it museum-like, with lots of old books and shells and skulls of birds and things like that. There's a beautiful Columnea - a goldfish plant - and then I put in the Pothos that has the little silvery marks on its leaves, Scindapsus Argyraeus - it's very in at the moment.

Matthew: It's a beautiful thing.

Anne: Then I had a conservatory extension that was heated and I stuck in there a jade vine, so I added one of those and a load of Hoyas and a box of postcards because I collect them and then I had my terrarium replanted, so there are pictures of knives and forks and spoons on long handles, ready for me to put plants in. Then I drew myself, sort of, I didn't put eyes and nose on because that was a bit weird, I just did my hair and my face and I stuck a little coronet with air plants on it around my head.

Matthew: A little air plant crown.

Anne: So that's me. I'm going to grow into a little old lady in a slightly improved office with masses of plants and a big map on the wall so I can see all the countries that they come from.

Matthew: Well, both of those are so creative and they sound like heavenly places of relaxation and gorgeous plants. I was thinking much more low-level and I was thinking I really want to get my hands on a variegated fiddle leaf fig. The other thing I saw on Instagram, my all-time favourite palm, is Licuala grandis which I find impossible because it needs heat and humidity. Look at the variegated. That's variegation porn at its best, isn't it?

Jane: That's amazing.

Matthew: Goodness knows where you get hold of it and I bet it would be a nightmare to keep looking like that. The leaves of Licuala grandis are like pleated paper, almost.

Anne: They're like fans aren't they?

Matthew: Or an old-school, pleated skirt and then all these white striations running through it. When I saw that I was like: "OMG!" This is a while ago, it had gone out on Instagram. It had over 4,000 likes. I'm sure it's impossible but I would be very happy with one of those. So, conclusion and looking forward, where do we think things are going with houseplants? Do you think it'll be sustained? What do you think is next? All the discussions about environment and just looking after our planet? Moving towards peat-free growing houseplants? What's on the horizon, Anne?

Anne: I feel that there are so many people getting so passionate about houseplants, they are going to really take to them and want to keep growing them because of the fascination element and not just because they're decorative. I also think that as the natural habitats of a lot of the plants are decreasing, we might end up preserving species because they've made successful houseplants. There are already examples of that, I think Echinocactus grusonii, unfortunately called mother-in-law's pin cushion.

Matthew: The mother-in-law's seat. Here we go again.

Jane: Those mother-in-laws, they get bad press.

Anne: It's unfair isn't it! Certainly when I was at Kew, that was a red dot plant, which meant that it was endangered in the wild, yet it's become a really popular landscaping in tropical or dry countries, or warmer ones. Also, as a houseplant, as a cactus in people's collections. So its survival is more or less insured in that respect, isn't it? In a way, I think we could actually conserve plants through keeping them.

Jane: You touched on sustainability there and that's something that I've been looking at on On The Ledge. For me, there's lots of awareness now in gardening generally about sustainability, but it hasn't translated quite so much into the houseplant realm as it has elsewhere. When you start asking questions about peat and about transport and about use of plastics, there's a lot of blanks when it comes to houseplants which I've been trying to gradually fill in and find out. If you go and look for a compost which is branded as houseplant compost that's peat free, it doesn't really exist, you can't really find that. So I've been experimenting with various peat-free options for house plants and with quite a lot of success using just the Silver Grow which is a produced by a company called Melcourt as a base for different house plant mixes, that seems to work quite well. But I am hoping that some of the peat-free compost companies will start looking at coming out with a branded houseplant compost because I think a lot of people buying that stuff for their house plants won't really be aware of it unless that option is out there. So I think that's something that's come to the fore of my mind and there'll be more transparency. More information about where plants are from, how they've been produced, what their carbon footprint is, just as we are with garden plants, I think that would be really great to see that moving forward. I'd also love to see propagation becoming something that people are really starting to get excited about and learning new propagation techniques, like air-layering, which we were talking about. Just so they can really get to that next level of houseplant ownership that comes after you've bought all of the lovely plants and seen them grow.

Matthew: We're out of time now, so thank you to both of you for coming to talk house plants. It's been the best hour of my afternoon in a while. I could sit and talk for another couple of hours with you both. As always, you can find links to more information about all the topics discussed on our programme page at RHS.org.uk/podcast including a link, of course, to the On The Ledge podcast with Jane Perrone and please remember to get in touch and tweet us your passion for houseplants. Finally, if you have time, please rate and review our podcast. It really helps other people who love plants to find us and share knowledge and their love of gardening. So thank you very much, ladies. I hope you've had a good afternoon. Happy houseplanting!

Jane: Thank you very much, Matthew.

Anne: Cheers.

[music]

Jane: Well, that's it for this week's show, I hope you enjoyed my chat with Matthew and Anne. Do check out the RHS podcast and if you're an RHS podcast subscriber who has popped over to check out On The Ledge, welcome! I hope you'll come and stay a while. Until next week, my friends, stay leafy! Bye!

The music in this week's episode was Roll Jordan Roll by The Joy Drops, Whistle by BenJamin Banger and Endeavour by Jahzzar. All licensed under Creative Commons. See JanePerrone.com for details.

Subscribe to On The Ledge via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Player FM, Stitcher, Overcast, RadioPublic and YouTube.

IMG_2328.jpg

In a unique collaboration, I joined up with the RHS Gardening Podcast to talk houseplants with Matthew Pottage, curator of RHS garden Wisley in Surrey, and Anne Swithinbank, houseplant expert and Gardeners’ Question Time panellist.

We spent a fabulous afternoon at RHS HQ in London talking about where the roots of our love for houseplants, what we’re growing now, and our dreams for the future! Check out the notes below as you listen…

Jane Perrone’s beefsteak Begonia.

patreon support.jpg

Fab, thanks for letting me know. We usually send out an email a week or so before to let volunteers know when the next session is. Times and days vary, as not everyone has the same availability. If you have your own hand tools and gloves that is great but we can supply them, just let us know. I hope that makes sense but let me know if you have any questions!

CREDITS

This week's show featured the tracks Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops, Whistle by BenJamin Banger (@benjaminbanger on Insta; website benjaminbanger.com). and Endeavour by Jahzzar.

Jane PerroneComment