Green Up Your Home: 10 Beautiful Books To Help You Keep Your Indoor Plants Alive

So you love this new craze of indoor plants digging its roots into interior design, but you’re a wee bit sad because of what you consider your black thumb. Well not to worry wanting plant parent, because we have a list of beautiful books that will not only look good on your coffee table but give you the skills you need for a thriving indoor garden.

At Natural Cool Air, we constantly advocate all things air related; clean, cool and healthy. And indoor plants help to not only clean and cool the air, but they have a variety of other health benefits as well. [Note: Please consider if you have any allergies to individual plants, we don’t want to mess with those.]

So here goes:

1) Top 50 Indoor Plants And How Not To Kill Them – Angie Thomas

The top 50 indoor houseplants for brightening your interiors – what’s best and how to keep them alive. Bring the outdoors in and breathe new life to your home with plants! House plants are well and truly back on trend – they instantly lift an area, make a room feel fresh and welcoming, and brighten your mood. On top of this, indoor plants are great for purifying the air and creating a healthier home. Together with microbes in the soil, plants work wonders to reduce harmful pollutants released from indoor furniture. (It’s true: look at the study conducted by the University of Technology, Sydney.)

If you feel like your rooms need a splash of colour and a breath of life, there’s no better starting point than this book. Whether your style is dramatic jungle plants or to sweetly shaped succulents, you’ll find something to suit. With loads of glorious illustrations for inspiration, data on which plants are suitable where, and clear advice on how to pot, prune and pet your plants, this is the perfect guide for bringing the outdoors in – no matter what your level of gardening skill

2) How To Raise A Plant And Make It Love You Back – Morgan Doane & Erin Harding

Aimed at a new generation of indoor gardening enthusiasts, this book is a perfect guide for anyone keen to see their plant offspring thrive. Plants have found popularity in the small home, and are being proclaimed the new stars of Instagram. This attractive little book is ideal for the novice ‘plant parent’, providing tips on how to choose plants, and above all, how to care for them and keep them thriving.

Indoor-plant experts and Instagrammers Erin Harding and Morgan Doane bring the subject to life alongside their beautiful photographs of happy plants in the home.

3) The Healing Power Of Plants – Fran Bailey

Plants make people happy. This gorgeous, modern guide features over 80 indoor plants that will turn your house into a happy, healthy, and healing home.

Discover plants that will clean the air you breathe, help you get a good night’s sleep, reduce stress and anxiety, help you get well soon, boost your brain power and bring greater joy and wellbeing into your life.

From cacti and succulents to ferns and palms; flowering plants and foliage – find the perfect house plants for your living room, bathroom, bedroom and even your workspace. Bring the joy of the outdoors in and harness the natural healing power of plants.

4) Urban Jungle: Living And Styling With Plants – Igor Josifovic & Judith De Graaf

‘Urban Jungle: Living and Styling with Plants’ is a source of inspiration, ideas and a manual for all of those who want to bring more plants into their home. The book guides the reader through different “green” homes in five European countries and shows how beautiful, unique, creative and even artistic living with plants can be. More than that the reader finds endless ideas for styling from the bloggers of the “Urban Jungle Bloggers” community.

To complete the topic of indoor plants, the book offers easy help for taking care of the plants and DIY tips. AUTHOR: Igor Josifovic is a blogger, social media expert, loves plants and commutes between Munich and Paris. He shares his affection for the topics interior design, travelling and especially “living with plants” with his readers on his “Happy Interior Blog” and the plant-community “Urban Jungle Bloggers”.

Judith de Graaff is also a blogger, works as a graphic designer and loves plants as well. She lives with her husband and her cats in a former factory building near Paris. Her blog JOELIX.com is her playground where style, colours and plants meet. She is a steady companion for the plant- community “Urban Jungle Bloggers” and hopes to inspire others with her love for all things green.

5) Urban Botanics: An Indoor Plant Guide For Modern Gardeners – Maaike Koster & Emma Sibley

Have trouble keeping house plants alive? Struggling to find your green fingers? Fear not! You can still have a beautiful plant-filled home with this stunning guide to indoor plants.

Whether you are looking to cultivate an entire indoor garden, or simply wish to know more about your single cactus, you can be sure to find the right information for you amongst the seventy-five plants in this stylish guide. And the best bit? All the plants are easy to maintain so even the most timid of gardeners can enjoy turning their hand to this green-fingered pastime.

Learn how to care for succulents, cacti, flowering and foliage plants even with a full-time job, with this unique gardening guide that is made to fit alongside our modern-day schedules. With endless inspiration to brighten up your home, desk or office, this beautiful book of plants from across the world is a must for lovers of art and design, as well as plants.

6) Leaf Supply: A Guide To Keeping Happy House Plants – Lauren Camilleri & Sophie Kaplan

Fresh flowers are great – everyone loves receiving them. But inevitably they’re already on the way out the door (and into the bin!) by the time they arrive. Plants – living, breathing, life-sustaining plants – are where it’s at!

Sydney-based authors Lauren Camilleri and Sophia Kaplan want you to fall in love with indoor gardening and growing as much as they do. Leaf Supply profiles and provides comprehensive (but easy to follow) care instructions for 100 houseplants – including tropical plants, palms, hanging plants, succulents, cacti, and more unusual varieties such as airplants and carnivorous plants – ensuring you learn and grow as your plant grows.

Much more than a plant guide, Leaf Supply also gives interior styling advice on choosing the right pots for your plants – both aesthetically and practically – as well as best utilising your space, and making the most of your indoor greenery, as well as advice on pet-friendly (as well as harmful) plants for your home. The book also profiles 10 tastemakers from creative fields who have integrated indoor greenery into their homes and workplaces – to give the reader a real insight into how plants can be used in everyday life.

This is a comprehensive guide for any budding green thumb interested in greening their apartment or inside their home.

7) Crazy Plant Lady – Isabel Serna

For the plant-obsessed woman of any age, this little illustrated book celebrates the delightfully quirky habits that accompany botanical passion, even addiction. Like seeing every bare surface as a reason to buy a new succulent, fern, or pileum. Or, when planning a fabulous vacation, wondering: But who will water my plants? Throughout there are humorous quotes: “I don’t need therapy, I talk to my plants.” Sweet puns: “Aloe you vera much.” A quiz: Are you a good plant mum? Plus, the telltale signs that you’re a crazy plant lady: Even your office is a houseplant jungle.

Author-illustrator Isabel Serna’s charming art is as bright and vibrant as the pops of colour that plants bring to your home, her text clearly inspired by being a crazy plant lady herself – put it together, and here is a perfect present for housewarmings and a great add-on to a gift of a potted plant or ceramic planter.

8) The New Plant Parent: Develop Your Green Thumb And Care For Your House Plant Family – Darryl Cheng

For indoor gardeners everywhere, Darryl Cheng offers a new way to grow healthy house plants. He teaches the art of understanding a plant’s needs and giving it a home with the right balance of light, water, and nutrients. After reading Cheng, the indoor gardener will be far less the passive follower of rules for the care of each species and much more the confident, active grower, relying on observation and insight. And in the process, the plant owner becomes a plant lover, bonded to these beautiful living things by a simple love and appreciation of nature.

The New Plant Parent covers all of the basics of growing house plants, from finding the right light to everyday care like watering and fertilizing, to containers, to recommended species. Cheng’s friendly tone, personal stories, and accessible photographs fill his book with the same generous spirit that has made @houseplantjournal, his Instagram account, a popular source of advice and inspiration for thousands of indoor gardeners.

9) Wild At Home: How To Style And Care For Beautiful Plants – Hilton Carter

Take a tour through Hilton’s own apartment and other lush spaces, filled with a huge array of thriving plants, and learn all you need to know to create your own urban jungle. As the owner of over 200 plants, Hilton feels strongly about the role of plants in one’s home – not just for the beauty they add, but for health benefits as well:

“having plants in your home not only adds life but changes the airflow throughout. It’s also a key design element when styling your place. For me, it wasn’t about just having greenery, but having the right variety of greenery. I like to see the different textures of foliage all grouped together. You take a fiddle leaf fig and sandwich it between a bird of paradise and a monstera and…. yes!’ You will be armed with the know-how you need to care for your plants, where to place them, how to propagate, how to find the right pot, and much more, and most importantly, how to arrange them so that they look their best. Combine sizes and leaf shapes to stunning effect, grow your own succulents from leaf cuttings, create your own air plant display, and more.”

10) Wonder Plants 2: Your Urban Jungle Interior – Irene Schampaert & Judith Baehner

A luxuriously illustrated coffee-table book, Wonderplants may have significant side effects. The overload of green interior design might have you grow green with envy and scurry off to a nearby garden centre.” – ELLE The green interiors trend is here to stay. The sequel to bestselling title Wonderplants, this second volume features even more inspiring ideas for a greener interior.

Wonder Plants 2 gathers twenty of the world’s best interior designs, each of the urban jungles that will inspire dreams of having an oasis of green at home. The book ends with a plant index and some useful tips and tricks, as well as an overview of new trends, with explanations by interior design experts.

AUTHORS: Irene Schampaert works as a graphic designer and has been blogging about design in the broad sense of the word, as well as colours and patterns, decoration and design, typography and photography for years. Judith Baehner is an author, blogger, freelance editor and stylist for just about anything that makes life a little more green. She previously published The Plants Lab. They co-wrote the internationally bestselling Wonderplants.

 

*All images and book overviews sourced from Amazon and The Book Depository