Episode 218: painting houseplants, with Aaron Apsley
Living in Florida gives Aaron Apsley lots of inspiration for his work. Photograph: Aaron Apsley.
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Transcript
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Jane: Hello and welcome to On The Ledge podcast, I'm recording with the door open today because it's springtime! I fear I may have been listening to too many musicals. This is On The Ledge podcast, the show that has chlorophyll pumping through every vein. In this week's show, I talk to Aaron Apsley about the delights of painting all the beautiful houseplants we love and I answer a question about book learning on pests and diseases.
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Jane: As you know, if you listen to the show regularly, I do love to blow my own trumpet. I mean literally, I did use to play the trumpet as a teenager, but I also like to tell you about my wonderful achievements. One of the things I'm most proud of that I've done so far in the houseplant realm is write Legends of the Leaf, my forthcoming book, being published by Unbound and crowdfunded by you lovely people. If you have not yet pre-ordered your copy there is a 20% off discount code available this Easter weekend, 2022, and it's Easter22. Yes, just use code Easter22 on checkout and you'll get 20% off the rate for whatever package you choose, up to the value of £100. So if you haven't pledged for the book, this is a good moment to do so and, if I were you, I would have your eye on the postcard pack reward level which gets you the book and also a pack of 25 postcards, each one illustrated by one of the beautiful pictures from the book by Helen Entwisle, so do go and check that out. I'll include all the info in the show notes at JanePerrone.com and if you've already pledged then please do let me know what questions you want me to answer in my upcoming author video just for people who have pledged. I want to know what you want to know about this book.
Thanks to Crystal, Elizabeth and Paul, who all became Ledge-ends this week, supporting me on Patreon, unlocking two extra chunks of audio every month in the form of An Extra Leaf and ad-free versions of the main show. Check out the show notes for details on how to join them and if you haven't subscribed to The Plant Ledger, my new email newsletter on the UK houseplant scene, crack on and get it done and unlock your free in-depth guide to fungus gnats.
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Jane: That's enough ambling through the preamble, it's now time to meet my guest this week Aaron Apsley.
Aaron: I'm Aaron Apsley, I'm a botanical artist and illustrator. I specialise in houseplants and tropical plants. You can find me on Instagram at Apsley_watercolor and I sell my prints and my artwork on my website AaronApsley.com
Jane: This sounds like a dream job. You're combining your profession of being an illustrator with your personal love of plants, how did that come about?
Aaron: It's been a lifelong journey, since I was a child I always was the type of kid who like if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be an artist. I was always painting and drawing and interested in the natural world. If you caught me drawing as a kid I was drawing an animal, I really liked dinosaurs and things like that, so I didn't necessarily know that I wanted to be a botanical artist but at the same time I was surrounded by plants and nature and had appreciation for plants as a child. My dad is actually a forester or a tree expert, basically, so I knew a lot about plants and trees as a kid and had an appreciation for that. I had a lot of encouragement from my parents, thankfully, to become an artist, so I pursued that and I went to college for it, I studied illustration and somewhere along the way, those things came together and I started painting plants. So after I graduated college with an art degree, I moved to New York City and I think that's really… when I was living in a small apartment there and for the first time in my life I was away from nature and away from plants more than I ever had been, is I think when I really realised that that's what one of my real passions in life is plants, basically. While I was in New York, I painted succulents, they were my main focus because, honestly, the only thing I had room for in my apartment was a bunch of little succulent plants, I didn't have room for any plants bigger than that. So I would go to all the plant shops and the botanical gardens and anywhere I could find anything to use as reference. That's when my career as a botanical artist really started. At the time I was doing landscapes, I didn't know what type of art I wanted to do but once I started painting those plants and just realising that's what I really had a passion for, that's what I kept doing. About three years ago my wife and I got the opportunity to move to Florida, which is where I live now, and that's opened up, of course, such a whole new world of tropical plants and having my own garden. It's just really been a fulfilment of being able to paint all kinds of tropical plants and do a lot more stuff other than just a few succulents on my windowsill, so it's been great.
Jane: Tell me a bit about how you work. I see lots of illustrators who've gone very digital in their approach to creating plant-based art, if I can put it that way. Do you still prefer the analogue?
Aaron: Traditional watercolour painting… well, it's the traditional way of doing botanical artwork going back hundreds of years and that's not the primary reason that I started doing watercolour. I have a lot of experience, like I said, when I was a child I learned to do all these different techniques in watercolour and pencil. So I have a lot of experience in that those areas but it's just something I decided to stick with because I really enjoy working with my hands and using the materials and I get a lot of satisfaction from that. With plants you're working with pigments and the materials themselves are at a certain extent, not completely, but they are derived from plants. The binder and watercolour is a gum from a tree, I just feel like I'm connected to the materials. You create this physical object that you can hold in your hands, it's not just a file on a computer. A lot of the art world, since I was in college, most people my age and younger have moved to a digital field. I use a lot of digital tools in my work, in my day-to-day workflow it does make things easier, I post my work online, I use those tools in my other freelance jobs and things but I also just get a lot of satisfaction out of the physical traditional painting.
Jane: Yes, I love seeing on your Instagram when you post, you've posted reels and things of you at work which I find really, really fascinating. What are you working on right now, are there any big projects you've got underway?
Aaron: Well, I’ve just finished a big project and I'm trying to figure out what's next. I always have a big list that's in the back of my mind and I try to write out what can I paint next. Earlier today I was painting some Begonia leaves, which are a bit of a challenge but always fun.
Jane: Why are Begonia leaves a particular challenge?
Aaron: There's incredible textures to Begonia, not all of them, they're very diverse, some of them are rather simple but any type of Rex Begonia or anything like that has scales and hairs on them. The shapes themselves are weird, they're not symmetrical the way most leaves are. So you really have to study them and I go all over the place looking for reference photos and reference plants. The colours are obviously crazy with Begonias, so they're very different from painting… I'm just painting the leaves right now. It's very different from painting a Philodendron or something like that, that a lot of times is just green and glossy, so you have a lot more going on with the Begonia.
Jane: I think you're perhaps best known on Instagram certainly for your Aroid images and I know you did an Aroid print in collaboration with the wonderful NSE Tropicals, tell me a bit about that?
Aaron: Yes, it's really amazing. I reached out to her a few years ago when I first got to Florida. I wanted to do these illustrations, like I've done these taxonomy prints, of the different Monstera species and the different Philodendron species and Alocasia anthurium. Whenever I do that type of thing, I want to see all these plants in person, I want to take photos and study them and study the textures. I rarely paint anything that I haven't been able to take my own photo of, like I need my own photos for reference, I can't just take the first photo on the internet and just go off that, that's unethical as an artist to do that. So I reached out to Enid because I thought: “Who better to look at a big collection of Anthuriums and Philodendrons than someone like Enid?” and she was kind enough to let me come over and take a bunch of photos and it was so helpful. I couldn't have done a lot of the work that I've done without people like her who helped me with that type of thing. I actually helped her, I did the logo… in the NSE Tropicals there's a monstera leaf that I painted for her a few years ago as part of her logo. Then she suggested doing a new T-shirt design and I based that on the beautiful living walls that she has at her nursery just covered in Aroids, they're absolutely unbelievable. So I took a bunch of photos of those and I've kind of made an imaginary image of all the plants growing together that she has and painted that and got it on a T-shirt, got it on a print, so that was a lot of fun.
Jane: That sounds amazing and I know lots of listeners are going to be wishing they were with you for that NSE Tropicals visit because I can imagine her place is, as I like to say, a cornucopia of delights, a phrase I overuse.
Aaron: It's not open to the public for very understandable reasons.
Jane: Yes, of course.
Aaron: Enid is a very busy person, it's really a one-person operation and she is incredibly hard-working but she's very nice and I admire her a lot because she's built this really incredible business pretty much by herself, she's a wonderful person.
Jane: The reason why you're painting so many Aroids because you're in Florida and you enjoy the challenge but also, I imagine, they might be your best sellers given how popular Aroids have been in the last few years?
Aaron: Yes, you'd be correct about that. They are very popular. I started painting Aroids out of a personal interest, moving to Florida, and I wanted to grow them myself. I started going out to the local nurseries and suddenly, after living in New York, it seemed like a fun opportunity… I've literally got trees in my yard with Philodendrons and Monsteras and things just climbing up them because, why not. So that was my own personal collection that I started painting at the beginning of this and I think it was very much a coincidence with me moving to Florida and some of the plant trends the last few years happening at the same time, that's what I was growing and that's what I wanted to paint and it was popular with my audience and everything.
Jane: That works quite well then, obviously, there's been an intersection between those two things rather than you thinking: “I really want to be drawing Gesneriads,” my favourite thing, “But actually I've got to draw Aroids because they're the thing that everyone wants to buy,” I guess you've avoided that by there being a great intersection between those two things. Please draw some Gesneriads though, can I request that?
Aaron: I've been lucky and that but, to be honest, you've mentioned variegated plants are not your favourite and they're not easy to paint, I'll tell you that, so I really don't feel the desire to sit around painting just whatever the trendiest new variegated thing is, so I really haven't even done that many of those. I love all plants and there are a lot of things that I want to paint, that I am painting, that may not be the trendiest thing and I'd love to paint some Gesneriads and I want to paint some of the native plants in Florida. I've got time to do it all of it so… Well, that's not always true, but eventually I will have time to paint all of the plants, hopefully, so I'm working on all kinds of different things.
Jane: I can imagine that some Gesneriads might be quite challenging because with the hairs on the leaves, how do you depict that, I can imagine that might be quite a challenge actually?
Aaron: I've got my technique. What you do for something like that is… watercolours is transparent and traditionally you've got to employ different techniques to get little details, but one thing you can do is get what's called gouache, which is basically like watercolour but it's got some opaque white pigment in it. So you can just get white watercolour and get little hairs in like that with a little bit of white paint, so you’re kind of breaking the rules of watercolour but there are techniques and I like to break the rules a little bit because I'm not always doing the most traditional… I've never been trained in the way that they used to do botanical illustration hundreds of years ago. I'm not self-taught as an artist totally, but I'm self-taught in the ways of botanical art, I just paint what's in front of me at whatever way I know how, so I figure it out.
Jane: I'm always talking on the show about observation and the way that it's key to plant care. I guess that's also the key to art, does that mean you're good at looking after your plants as well because you're good at observing them?
Aaron: That's a very interesting question. I definitely think I do have an eye for detail in general, I'm a very visual person, more than anything else. When it comes to looking at plants, I think I'm good at identifying plants and remembering how things look and going out and remembering what the names of plants are and stuff just because I remember what they look like. When it comes to taking care of them, maybe I remember what a pest looks like or a certain type of disease or something, I can visually identify it but I don't think that necessarily makes me good at taking care of plants. It really comes down to experience, I've only been growing plants in this environment for a couple of years and before that I didn't really grow up with houseplants so much or taking care of plants that much. So it's something you have to develop, trial and error over time, and I've got a lot of experience painting but plants are something I'm still learning a lot about.
Jane: I believe you've also been doing some work on a book by a former guest of the show, Michael Perry, what are you allowed to tell me about that? I don't think it's out yet.
Aaron: Yes, your listeners in the UK may be familiar with Michael Perry aka MrPlantGeek he is working on a book that will be out October 4th, it's called Hortus Curious and I am illustrating the entire book. So it's a bunch of watercolour illustrations of different plants, I don't think I can say much more than that. It was a big project, a lot of work, I recently wrapped on painting all that stuff. So if I've been a little MIA from some of my normal stuff over the past few months that's what I was working on and I'm very excited to see the final product. It was a lot of fun.
Jane: I can sympathise with the MIA. Books take a heck of a lot of time and energy whether you're writing or illustrating, it's amazing the work that goes into them.
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Jane: More from Aaron shortly but a short and sweet Q&A today. Jason got in touch to ask if there were any good books about houseplant pests and diseases and I'm afraid the answer is not that I know of, if you're talking about specifically indoor pests and diseases. There isn't a book that I found that covers just the indoor pests that we all know and despise. The book that I recommended to Jason is called Royal Horticultural Society: Pests and Diseases, there are various editions, try to get the most up-to-date one because the information has changed over the years in terms of what pesticides are currently licensed and so forth. Again, if you're in the UK this book is probably most relevant to you, if you're outside the UK there may be things in here that are not licensed in your country and there may be things excluded from this book because they are licensed where you are but not in the UK, so it's all very confusing. The Royal Horticultural Society: Pests and Diseases book is a great place to start, it covers indoor and outdoor but it goes into a good amount of depth and it will help you with your plant problems if you happen to prefer a book rather than going online. If you're in the US there is a book, I don't have a copy of this but I have seen it recommended before, which is Westcott's Plant Disease Handbook by R. Kenneth Horst. It's quite an expensive book, so possibly one you might want to pop to the library and borrow. If you've got any other recommendations for pest and disease books about houseplants and plants more generally then do let me know. Most of the good houseplant books have got a pest section but not a whole book dedicated to them, so perhaps someone's writing one right now, I do not know. If you know better please let me know, otherwise that RHS book is a good bet if you are in the UK. If you've got a question for On The Ledge podcast and my good self do drop me a line OnTheLedgepodcast@gmail.com and I will endeavour to help. Now let's get back to my chat with Aaron and I wanted to get onto the subject of Patreons.
Jane: Both of us have support from our followers via Patreon, does that impact on your work in a particular way in terms of your future plans being shaped by what Patreons are telling you or getting that feedback, how does that interaction affect what you do?
Aaron: Well, it's been an amazing experience getting support from my work over the years. I'm mainly supported through my print sales and selling my work online, originals and other products. I started the Patreon a few years ago during, kind of in the early days of the pandemic, and actually it came about as a result of Covid. My wife lost her job actually and that's the reason we moved to Florida originally was for a job that she got down here and so that went away. Ever since then my wife has been working full-time with me on our business with the artwork. It's amazing to me that we’re able to support ourselves with this and I'm so grateful to everybody who has been supportive and it blows my mind how supportive everyone is. So the Patreon was partially something she thought would be a good idea, like many things that I've done over the years, she comes up with good ideas. The biggest benefit to Patreon for us, and for me, is that it gives a lot of structure to how we work our year and month-to-month because it's a monthly thing. For my Patreon, we do physical rewards, so I send out to my level 2 subscribers, an envelope with stickers and miniature prints and things like that every month. Just having that as a goal each month to work on, what are we going to do for that, what bonus content, behind the scenes, I post about my garden, just having that as a something to work towards every month so we're not totally aimless on what are we going to do next, what are we going to work on.
Jane: I think people often think that for me doing a podcast: ”Oh, how fun, you're just chatting to people that must be really nice,” I'm not asking for sympathy here but it's that thing of it seems like a really nice job but actually there's a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes. I'm sure it's the same for you with art in that people just think you're sort of wafting along doing beautiful watercolours but actually it's a slog sometimes.
Aaron: I'm very grateful for it but it is work, it's a lot of hard work and it's very time consuming. I think being self-employed, as much as it has huge benefits, the one major downside is that you're always working and there's always something that I can be doing. I always feel like if I'm not painting then I should be. A lot of people say that when you do what you love that it kind of ruins that… like you should keep what you love as your hobby and not your job because it can ruin your passion for that thing. I think where I'm lucky is that my secret passion of what I really get joy out of in my life is the plants, the painting, the artwork is the job and what brings me the joy is the being around the plants and getting to work with the plants and getting to go plant shopping and going to a nursery as a part of my job. That's what keeps me going and I feel lucky to be able to do that. I'm a huge plant nerd, I guess.
Jane: Well, that's good to hear.
Aaron: More than an art nerd. I don't sit around looking at other paintings or going to museums.
Jane: What advice would you give to anyone who thinks: “I want to channel my arty side and my love of plants and I've never done any sort of drawing before but I want to start drawing my plants,” can you offer up some advice for those people, where do you start? Particularly if you've got a bit of fear of thinking: “I can't draw but I want to do this but I don't know where to start?”
Aaron: Well, how I started out with the plants, at least, was just painting the plants that were nearby to me. Like I said, when I was in New York, I had started collecting Haworthia in particular because they were growing well in the low-light conditions of the apartment. One day I looked over and said: “I'm not really appreciating this plant enough, it's just kind of sitting there, I don't even know anything about it.” I did some research on it, I thought: “That's really cool,” and then I did a painting of it and I think the key is, like you said earlier, observation and I would recommend… to answer your question for somebody who's new to this, really make an effort to paint from life. It's not always easy but it's going to make you a better artist and to actually paint the plant in front of you, you can see the detail, you can see all the colour. Don’t go and pull a photo off Google or pull the variegated Monstera leaf off Google because it's pretty, that's not going to teach you how to draw. Go out, even if you just go out on the street and clip a branch off a tree and just some leaves or something and then just study the shapes of that, get to know the plant and how it grows and really try to observe it and look at it. That's how you would teach yourself to… you’ve got to see it.
Jane: I think that's great advice. I imagine there might be some listeners to this who would love to make a connection between their planty passion and maybe some kind of creative skill that they have. You're probably making it look quite easy but, actually making that work and making a living at what that kind of thing is hard, how have you built up such a great following on Instagram? Have you got a strategy or have you just been putting up what you like? Which is my kind of approach.
Aaron: Well, that stuff, I started quite a long time ago with Instagram in particular, this is something I've been working on for a long time, it doesn't happen overnight. I did start Instagram… oh gosh, in 2014 maybe 2015, I guess maybe in more like 2015, and it took a while. I did different things and some things worked and some things didn't and I think it was probably easier to be honest back then even than it is now to get noticed because there were less people doing that sort of thing than there are now probably. I think Instagram also is… I've seen a lot of people complaining that the platform is dying out a little bit, not as many people are using it doesn't seem like. I don't know what the next thing is going to be but that's fine, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing, not going to get too worried about that but…
Jane: I think that's the struggle isn't it, as a creative person, feeling like you've got to be always on to the next thing and trying to predict what's going to happen and get ahead of it, which is hard.
Aaron: Yes, I'm not the kind of person who naturally enjoys putting myself out there. I'm a fairly private person by nature, so that's not something that came natural to me but as a self-employed artist, never going to make a living if people don't know that you're… for a while I was just literally sitting in my New York apartment every day painting things and then just not posting them on the internet, just putting them in the drawer. At a certain point my wife said: “You should start an Instagram account or put them online somewhere, so that somebody can maybe buy them or something,” so you’ve got to put yourself out there and make an effort and I do that to the best of my ability. I'm sure, again, there's more I could be doing in that department to promote myself and sell my work but it always takes a mental effort if nothing else to do all that stuff.
Jane: You're a self-confessed plant nerd. Lots of listeners will be very jealous of you living in Florida because I imagine the distinction between houseplant and gardenplant doesn't really exist? You can grow stuff outside that only could be grown inside, certainly here where I am in the UK, so tell me about what you like to grow and how you like to grow it.
Aaron: Well, that's a good way of putting it, the distinction is very blurred for sure. I am at this point much more of a gardener as I like to think of it than a houseplant person. I am very lucky… it's something I literally used to dream about when I lived in New York, is just having soil outdoors just to put plant stuff in. Again, I grew up where that was just a given, you could go in the woods and stuff and I was so deprived of that in New York that I just wanted to garden. I think wherever I would have moved out of the city, that's what I wanted, that's what I would have done, I would have just had a garden and planted things in the ground. Luckily, I ended up somewhere that… here in southern Florida it's a US Zone 10 climate, which means it has not frosted since we lived here, it doesn't really ever freeze, maybe once in every 10 or 20 years we'll have something like that. But you can grow pretty much any tropical plant that you could think of outdoors, sort of with some exceptions, some things are super sensitive and it's a lot of fun. I feel incredibly lucky, we moved into this house with a little residential yard that was completely empty for the most part, a couple of trees provided some nice shade but not really any landscaping to speak of and I looked at it as my blank canvas. I've had so much fun just sticking plants in the ground and putting them where I think they would look good. I try to share on my Instagram and my Patreon and stuff as much as I can some of that progress and how things have grown and my trial and error, but it's just my biggest joy in life really, is that garden and growing those things and experimenting. There are downsides to growing in this sort of climate, probably the biggest one is just that for most of the year it's not pleasant weather for people. The plants love it but it's so hot and humid and sweaty and then the bugs love it too. You could go out there and everything's got spider mites and mealy bugs and aphids and thrips on it and the leaves are crispy because it hasn't rained, it literally hasn't rained here in two or three months because it's the dry season, it's not a tropical paradise out there right now, it's really pretty rough. Then in a few months it'll rain every day and then things will be rotting. So everything's exposed to nature and you've got to manage that, it's a different world to houseplants. I have the sink or swim attitude with the plants, I like the idea that I can stick something in the ground and even if I go away and just leave it, it can do its own thing, I don't have to babysit it and that appeals to me a lot.
Jane: I know exactly what you mean, I lived in Louisiana for a couple of years when I was young, when I was doing my Master's degree. To me, as an English person arriving, it's like I've walked into a steam bath and it's just a totally different… like the speed at which things grow, the size of the insects, everything just blew my mind. So I can imagine it is really different but, as you say, I'm sure lots of people who don't live in that kind of climate, who live in a more temperate climate like me, just imagine it to be some wonderful jungle where nothing ever goes wrong but, actually, I imagine that things can go wrong quite badly?
Aaron: Oh many things go… everything goes wrong. Yes, it's an intense struggle, you're struggling against nature but it's enormously rewarding too and when things go right, they grow fast and it's a lot of fun. So a lot of successes and a lot of failures.
Jane: Have you got any favourite plants or big success stories to share?
Aaron: I would say if I had to highlight one, my favourite plant out there is… I have an Australian Tree Fernm, I might butcher the Latin, Cyathea cooperi, I think it has a bunch of synonyms because who knows what their actual genus is. I got it in a little one gallon pot, it was one foot tall, fairly early on after we moved here I looked up all the care instructions and I dug a big hole, put a bunch of peat and compost in there because they like really moist soil. The soil here in Florida is just pure sand, it's incredible, if you're used to any other normal part of the world and you put your hand in the dirt, it's not dirt, it's beach sand. So a fern does not naturally like that except for when it's raining all the time which is not always raining. Anyway, you’ve got to find the right spot for a fern to be happy. So I put it near the house on the north side where it would be mostly in shade, covered by a tree a little bit and it's just done amazingly well. It’s taller than me, it's got about a two-foot trunk that's forming in three years, it's just exploded in size. I've always admired the tree ferns of the botanical garden because they're so prehistoric and you get that dinosaur plant feeling, it's like a very ornate palm tree and I just love the look of them and to be able to just have one growing out there that looks so crazy like that and is growing so fast, it makes my day every day when I look out the window and see it.
Jane: I bet you don't have to wrap it in winter like we do here in the UK.
Aaron: That's true you can grow tree ferns in the UK that you would grow a Dicksonia more likely, they're a little more cold hardy.
Jane: Down in Cornwall and right in the far southwest where it's the mildest part of the UK, people do grow those Cyatheas and Dicksonias but they have to be wrapped in straw and all this kind of stuff.
Aaron: No, there are plants where theoretically on an abnormally cold winter where we're going to have some damage here with some of the things… even this winter, it got almost down to freezing and a few things looked a little worse for wear but I think the tree fern is pretty bulletproof in this climate, it just needs a lot of water.
Jane: What's it like going to a garden centre in Florida, what would I be seeing? I can't even imagine how it would be arranged because the divisions that I'm used to here in the UK wouldn't really exist?
Aaron: It's funny because there are a lot of the big… in the US there's Costa Farms, I don't know if the… I guess they wouldn't have that in Europe but they're based not too far from here in Florida and they ship their houseplants all over the country. A garden centre or plant store or a nursery is set up the same way here where there really is a distinction between the houseplants and the outdoor plants, which is rather arbitrary here. So you go into this shade house and they'll have the little pots of the Begonias but then they'll have some of the same plants in larger pots outside a few feet away. So they do make the distinction still and I don't know why. I think people occasionally will come to Florida and think that they're just going to walk into a nursery and find some priceless Aroid and it's going to be really cheap and they can buy a bunch of plants that they can take north and sell to their friends or something. I don't think it's that different compared to how it is in most other parts of the country. There are certainly things like Monsteras and Palms and stuff that just due to the sheer size of the plant you would pay a lot more for the equivalent plant up north and that's just due to shipping costs. As far as selection, especially in the past few years, the plant craze and the plant shops that have opened… I deal with plant shops to wholesale my work and I know there's some great plant shops and even a lot of small towns all across the country and if you're interested in rare houseplants, I don't think you're even going to get better prices on that stuff in Florida right now than you are in the rest of the country, maybe a little bit better prices, a little bit better selection, but it's not a different world unless, like I said, you want a big palm tree or something.
Jane: Well it's been delightful to talk to you. Is there anything else that we haven't covered that you wanted to mention, any new projects coming up or things that you wanted to highlight?
Aaron: No, I think that covers it really well. It's been lovely talking to you, I have really enjoyed it. I don't know if I mentioned I've been a fan of your podcast for many years since when I first started getting into houseplants in New York, it's been a delight listening to you and thanks for having me on, it's been a joy, so thank you.
Jane: My pleasure, I didn't invite you on just because you listened to the podcast but, obviously, that helps! It's been really fun to talk to you and I'm in awe of your incredible talent and I'll put all the links to your stuff in the show notes for everyone to go and have a look at if they're not aware of your work.
Aaron: Like I said, I've finished that big project and I've got a big list of things I need to paint. I'm going to be working really hard this year and painting a lot of stuff, so follow me on Instagram and there's going to be a lot of exciting stuff happening, so I'm excited to share all of it.
Jane: Awesome, thank you so much.
Aaron: Thank you, Jane.
[music]
Jane: Thanks so much to Aaron for joining me this week and do check out the show notes for some images of Aaron's work and also links to his website and Instagram. If you're an arty person, I'd love to see your houseplant creations, do send them through and I will share them on my social media, it's wonderful to see that you're such a creative bunch. That's all for this week's show, I will be back next Friday, just you try and stop me. Until then, keep your Aspidistras flying and your Begonias blooming, bye.
[music]
Jane: The music you heard in this episode was Roll Jordan Roll by The Joy Drops, The Road We Used To Travel When We Were Kids by Komiku and Whistle by BenJamin Banger. The ad music was Dill Pickles by the Heftone Banjo Orchestra. All tracks are licensed under Creative Commons, visit the show notes for details.
Photograph: Aaron Apsley.
I chat to Florida-based botanical artist Aaron Apsley about the joys and challenges of painting houseplants, and I answer a question about books on pests and diseases.
This week’s guest
Aaron’s website is at aaronapsley.com and you can find him on Instagram at @apsley_watercolour and @aaronapsley. His Patreon is here.
Aaron’s living wall print for NSE Tropicals is available here. You can see an image of it below.
The book Aaron has illustrated for Michael Perry (aka Mr Plant Geek) is Hortus Curious, out October 2022.
The Australian tree fern Aaron mentions is Cyathea cooperi - you can see an image of it in his garden below.
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The Australian tree fern Cyathea cooperi in Aaron’s garden. Photograph: Aaron Apsley.
Aaron’s living wall print for NSE Tropicals.
question of the week
Jason asked for suggestions on books about pests and diseases in houseplants - as far as I know there is not an up to date book that covers exactly this: the nearest option is RHS Pests and Diseases by Pippa Greenwood and Andrew Halstead. Often I suggest buying books secondhand but with this one, it’s worth buying the most recent edition so you get current advice. Another US-focused book I have seen recommended (but not read myself) is Westcott’s Plant Disease Handbook (it’s very expensive so you may want to visit a library to check it out!)
I recommended some of my favourite houseplant books in a Q&A during episode 131.
Want to ask me a question? Email ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com. The more information you can include, the better - pictures of your plant, details of your location and how long you have had the plant are always useful to help solve your issue
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CREDITS
This week's show featured the tracks Dill Pickles by the Heftone Banjo Orchestra, Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops, The Road We Use To Travel When We Were Kids by Komiku and Whistle by BenJamin Banger (@benjaminbanger on Insta; website benjaminbanger.com).