How not to kill your house plants

The year was 2015, and I was head over heels, completely obsessed with House of Hackney’s Palmeral wallpaper. The bold print features fans of colonial green palm leaves splayed across a soothing off-white background, and I fantasised about plastering it over all four walls of my London living room, thinking it was the closest I was going to get to living in a tropical paradise any time soon. But as it turns out, I was thinking small. Very small. Sproutl – a schmancy new gardening and outdoor living platform – have just launched a tropical plant collection in collaboration with none other than The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; so now we can all have our very own slice of their iconic Palm House in our living rooms.

I’m sure I don't need to tell you that houseplants have become big business in the last decade. According to the Garden Centre Association, sales of houseplants were up 29 per cent in 2021 on the previous year, and more than 50 per cent on 2019 figures. Meanwhile, a recent poll by Miracle Gro found that the average Brit owns seven houseplants and spends more than £300 a year on foliage friends – with spend jumping to over £400 a year for 18 to 24-year-olds. If my memory serves me right, it all began with succulents. Suddenly the little blighters were everywhere; in the windows of happening hairdressers, on sale in your local Tesco Metro in snazzy pastel pots, and plastered over greetings cards and novelty mugs accompanied by infuriating cutsie slogans like ‘succ it’ and ‘what the f••culent’ (thank you, Etsy).

Small, Instagram-worthy and low maintenance, succulents are apparently the perfect houseplant for the dispossessed millennial. Not long after I moved into my flat, I treated myself to a gorgeous pinky purple one (which the internet informs me was an Echeveria dusty rose). I felt so fancy; I loved it madly; it lasted three weeks. Plants don’t tend to thrive under my care. Either I kill them with kindness (too much water), or they wither from neglect. My current collection includes a leaning tower of Swiss cheese plant, which is literally clinging to its moss poll by a thread; a pair of Chinese money plants, which seem to drop a leaf for every new one they grow (is this, like, a thing?); and a perennially droopy peace lily which, to be quite honest, is doing my absolute head in.

With prices starting at £80 for an ‘ultra-rare’ Philodendron white knight – a neat, desk-sized plant with striking white flashes across its leaves – and going up to £295 for a dark leafed elephant's ear – a monster of a plant with impressive matte, almost-black leaves – the Palm House collection’s super-sized plants come with matching price tags. This obviously means the stakes for keeping them alive are high… very high. So what are the chances of that actually happening? ‘Perhaps surprisingly, our Kew x Sproutl plants aren't divas,’ Hollie Newton, Sproutl’s Chief Creative Officer and author of How to Grow: A Guide for Gardeners who Can't Garden Yet, reassures me. ‘Each plant comes with comprehensive care instructions, but broadly they like a sunny spot, need watering only when the soil feels dry, and those with the largest leaves like the banana plant and the alocasia will enjoy regular misting throughout the week,’ she says. ‘Our Kew plants love routine, so one of the best things you can do for your plant is to keep things consistent; try not to keep moving them, water them at around the same time, and keep them in the same pot for the first few years.’

The collection, which is made up of seven plants, has been about a year in the making, and Newton tells me it was a truly collaborative process. ‘To choose the plants, we literally walked around the Palm House with the head gardener and our sourcing team, and worked out how to truly "get the look."’ But can these tropical plants from far-flung places really thrive in our UK homes? ‘Plants are keen to adapt, and modern house plants are tough,’ Newton explains. ‘Many of the plants in our collection are the exact same genus as their cousins in Kew – which were all originally brought to England from far off tropical locations, and have learned to thrive indoors – whereas others are lookalikes cultivated to thrive in a normal house's warmth and moisture levels.’

So which plant from the Palm House collection is best suited to me – a woman with a 50/50 houseplant survival rate and a north-west facing living room? Apparently that would be the ‘Maggy’ shield plant, which I’m told only needs ‘a bit of love’ and is ‘the most resilient’ of the pack. If anyone can put these claims to the test, I believe it is me.