The New Plant Parent
Develop Your Green Thumb and Care for Your House-Plant Family
Darryl Cheng · Abrams Image, 2019
The book that stops you looking up your plant and teaches you to read your room instead. If you only buy one house plant book, we'd argue for this one.
What's actually in it
- Part 1: Caring for Plants — the principles. Light above all, then soil and aeration, water, containers and drainage, fertiliser, pruning, propagation, repotting, pests and tools.
- The light chapter is the reason to own it: it teaches you to measure light quantitatively (light meters, foot-candles) and demolishes vague phrases like "bright indirect light".
- Part 2: House Plant Journal — 19 individual plants documented over several years with the author's own time-lapse photography, showing the difference between a plant surviving and a plant growing.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- He kills the most persistent house plant myth in one line: do not put a layer of gravel in the bottom of the pot. It does not improve drainage.
- A named soil-probe technique with three readable states. Push a wooden probe or skewer into the compost: wet soil sticks to it, lightly moist soil feels soft, dry soil is brittle. His rule is to decide by observing the soil, never by following a schedule.
- Aerate before watering — gently poke holes through the compost with a chopstick so water reaches the whole rootball rather than running down the sides.
- The contrarian core: "bright indirect light" is meaningless. He replaces it with two things you can actually assess — how much open sky the plant can see, and how many hours of direct sun it gets. His framework separates the light a plant needs to survive from roughly double that, which is what it needs to grow.
- The numbers that explain why shop-bought plants decline at home. A nursery runs at around 5,000 foot-candles all day; a typical flat sits at 100–200. Direct sun through a window is about 4,900; "far from the window" is about 50. And he warns that your eyes adjust across that whole range, so you will never feel the difference.
Buy it if
You've bought care guides before and your plants still died. This explains why.
Don't buy it if
Anyone who wants to look up the plant they just bought. Only 19 species appear, and it is a poor lookup reference by design.
Where it falls short
Not a directory, and doesn't pretend to be. No UK seasonality, no styling content, no rare or collector plants. Reviewers consistently say the information is dense enough that reading it straight through is hard going — it works better as a reference you return to. We could find no evidence of systematic toxicity information, so don't use it for pet safety.
Who wrote it
Cheng is an engineer and business analyst in Toronto — his own site is subtitled "An Engineer's Approach to House Plants". He has no horticultural qualification whatsoever, and that is more or less the point: he came to plants around 2013 and rebuilt the whole subject around measurement rather than folklore. Two things to weigh. Toronto sits at about 43°N — brighter than anywhere in Britain, so his worked examples are generous for a UK reader even though the method travels. And he now sells a branded light meter, which the 2019 book predates but which a reader following his advice today will quickly meet.
Where it was written
Written from Toronto (~43°N). London is 51°N and Edinburgh 56°N — UK winter light is materially lower and the daylight season shorter than his worked examples assume. Because the method is "measure your own light", it travels better than most, but his examples don't.
The facts
- AuthorDarryl Cheng
- PublisherAbrams Image
- Published2019
- FormatPaperback, 208 pages
- ISBN-13
9781419732393 - LevelBeginner to improver
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.