How Not to Kill Your Houseplant
Survival Tips for the Horticulturally Challenged
Veronica Peerless · DK, 2023
A triage manual. Something is wrong with your plant, you don't know what it is, and you want the answer in under a minute.
What's actually in it
- The Basics — how to buy a plant, where to put it, how to water, how to feed, how to spot pests and diseases.
- An 8-page illustrated identification index to work out what the unlabelled thing on your windowsill actually is.
- Individual plant entries with care panels for light, temperature, water, food and humidity.
- "What's wrong with my plant" symptom panels — yellowing leaves, drooping, brown spots, crispy edges.
- Pointers from each plant to similar plants needing the same care, which is a genuinely good idea and rare.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- 119 plants across 144 pages, each on a two-page spread with a fixed structure: a "How NOT to kill it" panel covering location, light, watering and feeding; a "Bug alert!" pest panel; and a symptom-led leaf-condition block.
- It works symptom → cause → fix at the level of the individual plant. Baby's tears going leggy is diagnosed as needing somewhere cooler; a poinsettia dropping leaves is diagnosed as soil kept too dry. It is a diagnostic manual, not a browsing book.
- An eight-page illustrated identification index at the front, so you can find the unlabelled thing on your windowsill before you read its entry. Most competitors assume you already know what you own.
- Each entry points you to other plants wanting the same care — a small idea that makes a beginner's collection much easier to manage.
Buy it if
You want the cheapest useful house plant book there is, and you want it to work like a first-aid kit.
Don't buy it if
Anyone who wants to understand rather than fix.
Where it falls short
It's thin, deliberately. No serious propagation, no substrate science, no light measurement, no design, no seasonality. It's a starting point that won't cover every scenario, and it says as much itself. One thing DK hasn't explained: what actually changed in the 2023 "new edition" — there's no published changelog. We could find no evidence of systematic toxicity flagging.
Who wrote it
Peerless studied horticulture and then garden design at Capel Manor College, and spent twenty years in horticultural publishing — assistant then deputy editor of Which? Gardening, features editor at The English Garden, content editor at gardenersworld.com. She gardens in Bath. The honest read: the load-bearing credential is a consumer-testing and editorial role rather than a grower's. But Bath is at 51°N, so unlike the Canadian and Australian books on this shelf her light and heating assumptions are simply correct for a British home. We found no commercial conflict at all — no shop, no nursery, no branded product.
Where it was written
Originated at DK UK with a UK author; the US edition is the derivative. Light and heating framing suits British homes.
The facts
- AuthorVeronica Peerless
- PublisherDK
- Published2023
- EditionNew edition
- FormatHardback, 144 pages
- ISBN-13
9780241636213 - LevelBeginner
Checked against publisher listings, UK retailers and library records in August 2026. If any of this is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
Where to get it
Buying secondhand? Match the ISBN above — several books on this shelf have editions that look identical but aren't.