The Kew Gardener's Guide to Growing House Plants
The art and science to grow your own house plants
Kay Maguire, with Royal Botanic Gardens Kew · Frances Lincoln, 2026
Organised by plant group rather than alphabetically — so it teaches you that ferns as a class want one thing and cacti another, instead of asking you to memorise plants one at a time.
What's actually in it
- Introduction — why house plants, and how to choose.
- Display and staging — solo specimens, growing vertically, hanging plants, shape and texture.
- Eight plant groups, each with its native-habitat context plus care: ferns, palms, cacti, succulents, bromeliads (including air plants), flowering house plants, foliage plants and carnivorous plants.
- General growing techniques — light, temperature, humidity, watering, repotting, feeding, holiday care.
- Propagation — five methods.
- 12 step-by-step projects — kokedama, macramé planters, cactus grafting, air-plant displays.
- Troubleshooting.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- The organising principle is right-plant-right-place, run in both directions — finding the right plants for your home, and the right spot in your home for your plants.
- Coverage is grouped by plant type: cacti, succulents, bromeliads including air plants, foliage plants, flowering plants, and plants for scent and air freshening. Learning the group teaches you the plant.
- Twelve projects with real page-space, several of them habitat-flavoured: Several Steps Up, Making a Decorative Screen, A Shallow Bowl for Succulents, Carnivorous Vase, Desert Islands, Hanging Gardens, Windowsill Propagation, Picture Perfect, Simple Kokedama, Miniature Rainforest, Natural Air Fresheners and Driftwood Anchor.
- Around 100 colour illustrations across 144 pages, with photography by Jason Ingram — a small-format, gift-weight reference rather than a manual.
Buy it if
You want to understand plants in groups rather than memorise them one at a time, and you like the object as much as the information.
Don't buy it if
Anyone needing depth. 144 pages has to hold ~70 plants, 12 projects, a display section and a care section.
Where it falls short
The publisher says 70 plants; Kew's own shop says over 75 — we can't reconcile that. More importantly for a book you might use to identify something: the artwork is largely archival Kew botanical illustration, not photography of the specific cultivar described. It's beautiful, but an illustration may show the species type rather than the plant you own. Heavily positioned as a gift book. No toxicity coverage that we could verify.
Who wrote it
Maguire trained at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and holds the Kew Diploma — a three-year professional horticultural qualification — and was Horticultural Editor of BBC Gardeners' World magazine for six years. She now produces video for the RHS website and writes for The Garden and Amateur Gardening. One honest note: both the Kew Diploma and the six-year editorship trace to publisher-supplied copy repeated across retailers; we could not confirm either from Kew or the BBC directly. Her long author archive on gardenersworld.com does corroborate a substantial working relationship.
Where it was written
Kew Publishing, UK author and photographer. UK light and heating framing.
The facts
- AuthorKay Maguire, with Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
- PublisherFrances Lincoln
- Published2026
- EditionPaperback reissue of the 2019 hardback
- FormatPaperback, 144 pages
- ISBN-13
9781805700326 - 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.