RHS Practical House Plant Book
Choose The Best, Display Creatively, Nurture and Care
Zia Allaway & Fran Bailey, with the RHS · DK, 2018
The biggest UK-authority house plant directory at a sensible price — 175 profiles, plus a design section most care books skip.
What's actually in it
- Designing with Houseplants — choosing, arranging and curating a collection, which is the part rival care books leave out.
- 175 plant profiles, grouped by type: ferns, orchids, succulents, cacti, foliage, flowering and air-purifying plants.
- Care and troubleshooting — repotting, watering, composts and drainage, light, temperature, propagation, pests and diseases, pruning and diagnosis.
- 12 step-by-step projects — terrariums, kokedama string gardens, macramé planters, succulent propagation.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- It leads with design, not care. The opening covers how to group plants, how to match plant size to room size and what to grow them in — before it reaches light and temperature. A deliberate choice, and the reason it appeals to flat-dwellers more than to experienced growers.
- 175 plant profiles across 224 pages, roughly half the book, grouped by type rather than alphabetically.
- Twelve named step-by-step projects: a desert-scape, air plant stand, macramé hanger, open bottle terrarium, willow climbing frame, succulent wreath, kokedama fern, moss picture frame, dry terrarium, wood-mounted orchid, living space divider and propagation shelf. It is a making book as much as a care book.
- It is a merge of two earlier RHS titles — the original house plant book and the RHS cactus and succulent book — which is why the succulent coverage runs deeper than a general house plant guide normally would.
Buy it if
You want one UK-authority book covering a lot of plants, and you care how the collection looks as well as whether it lives.
Don't buy it if
Anyone who wants depth on individual species — 175 profiles in 224 pages is about half a page each.
Where it falls short
It's now eight years old, and botanical names have moved since 2018 — most notably Sansevieria to Dracaena and Calathea to Goeppertia. Don't quote its nomenclature without checking. No light measurement methodology, no substrate science, nothing on rare or collector plants. We found no evidence of systematic toxicity flagging, which for an RHS-branded book is a surprise.
Who wrote it
Zia Allaway is a qualified horticulturist who has written and edited widely for the RHS and DK, including the RHS Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers. Fran Bailey grew up on a Yorkshire cut-flower nursery, studied at the Welsh College of Horticulture and founded a flower shop in South London in 2006. The consultant editor is Christopher Young, horticultural team leader of the Glasshouse at RHS Wisley and a member of the RHS Tender Ornamental Plant Committee — the credential that separates this from its rivals, since an actual working glasshouse manager checked it. Disclose: Bailey sells this book through her own shop.
Where it was written
RHS-endorsed, UK authors, UK heating and light assumptions.
The facts
- AuthorZia Allaway & Fran Bailey, with the RHS
- PublisherDK
- Published2018
- FormatHardback, 224 pages
- ISBN-13
9780241317594 - 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.