Wild at Home
How to style and care for beautiful plants
Hilton Carter · CICO Books, 2019
A beautiful interiors book with plant care attached. We're listing it as that, because almost everyone else lists it as a care book and it isn't.
Nearly every affiliate roundup online lists this as a "best house plant care book". It has no plant directory at all. Plants appear as examples inside styling spreads, and the same five to ten species recur — fiddle-leaf fig, monstera, bird of paradise, air plants, succulents. The care content is generic. Buy it to be inspired about how plants look in a room; don't buy it to find out why yours is dying.
What's actually in it
- An introduction to living with plants and choosing them.
- A photographic tour of Carter's own apartment and other plant-filled interiors, with styling guidance.
- A plant-care section covering potting, watering, light, feeding, propagation and pest control at a general level.
- Small projects: succulent leaf-cutting propagation, air-plant displays, choosing pots.
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 structure tells you what the book is: three chapters of styling and home tours, and one chapter of care essentials at the back.
- The build projects are display furniture, not horticulture — Making a Plant Hammock, Making a Plant Throne, Making a Lamp Terrarium.
- His styling doctrine, in his own words, is contrast of texture and scale: "it wasn't about just having greenery, but having the right variety of greenery… take a fiddle leaf fig and sandwich it between a birds of paradise and a monstera."
- The practical content the publisher actually commits to is narrow: growing succulents from leaf cuttings, creating an air plant display, where to place plants, how to propagate, and how to find the right pot.
Buy it if
You know how to keep a plant alive and now want your flat to look like the ones on Instagram.
Don't buy it if
Anyone with a plant problem to solve.
Where it falls short
Reviewers consistently note heavy repetition of both text and photographs, and a very narrow plant range despite Carter owning 200-plus plants. One more thing: the publisher copy asserts air-purification benefits. We'd treat that carefully — the well-known NASA clean-air study is routinely overstated for real rooms, and the effect at domestic plant densities is negligible.
Who wrote it
Carter holds a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in film, and is described everywhere — including by himself — as a plant and interior stylist, artist and filmmaker. No horticultural qualification is claimed by anyone, including him. He is self-taught, keeps over 200 plants in a Baltimore apartment, and runs an e-commerce shop selling plants and plant accessories. None of that is a criticism — he is genuinely excellent at what he does. It is simply not what most people buying a "plant care" book think they are getting.
Where it was written
Carter is Baltimore-based. The apartment light and window framing is American, even though the publisher is British — which disguises it.
The facts
- AuthorHilton Carter
- PublisherCICO Books
- Published2019
- FormatHardback, 144 pages
- ISBN-13
9781782497134 - 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.