 Good evening everyone, welcome to the British Library. Unfortunately our chair Tony is still unavailable but we're going to start the conversation now without him and hopefully he'll be coming to join us any moment. I'm Brett Walsh from the Cultural Events Department, it's my pleasure to welcome you here tonight to this little oasis we've created in the entrance hall of the British Library. We're going to be discussing the humble house plant tonight and we'd like you all to get involved by sending us your pictures of your beloved botanicals so if you want to send a picture in you can at us on the at events bl twitter handle and if you're watching us online there's a form underneath the video where you can submit your pictures. We'll also be taking questions at the end of the event so you can submit your questions there too. So yeah without further ado I think we're going to hand over to Mike to begin with who's going to do a short presentation on his book The History of House Plants and Mike will also be doing a signing after the event and then following that we'll be going into a panel conversation and then we'll take questions from the audience. Thank you very much. Right good afternoon or good evening everyone I'm sorry we've kept you waiting. I came to house plants quite late I was my father was a professional horticulturist and he regarded house plants as a yeah really not something that he could get into my mother on the other hand had had a few house plants but I've worked a lot I've worked in botanic gardens and in with plant related jobs and I suddenly realized that there's amazing stories behind all these plants that we pick up at the garden center or we pick up at the railway station or wherever or we in fact exchange with our friends or indeed perhaps even perloin cuttings when we're out and about I'm just looking to see if anyone twitched guiltily when I said that yes there's one or two people I think have subconsciously admitted to stealing a cutting yes thank you botanic garden man so so I started realizing that you could tell the history of the evolution of science you could tell the evolution of design through house plants and how people have invited plants into their houses and now we've got designers who are talking about multi species clients so it's not just the humans it's the other living things that live in the house whether it's our focus on plants now but perhaps in the next 5 10 15 20 years it'll not only be house plants it'd be house algae and house fungi and we'll see that taxonomic spread of interest so if we go back in history we've always been bringing plants into our dwellings whether it's to make the place smell better to get rid of parasites whether it's to bring them in as herbs or as as we approach Christmas as decorations but the bringing living plants into houses really in the western tradition goes back to the 1700s and at that point there was a an interesting convergence of more wealth bigger houses a little bit more glass um a little bit more dependable heating and new plants were coming in so during the 1600s 1700s you started to get an interest in plants could I have the next slide please so I'm going to go back to this honorable gentleman Thomas Fairchild and he was a London nurseryman and he wrote the city gardener and that was one of the early books that said it's great to bring plants into your house they sent it they decorate it and so he really was one of the first people to start talking about house plants with house plants as we know it was Thomas Rochford that really came up with that idea in the mid 20th century but the great thing about Thomas Fairchild is that he did the first recorded hybridization between two species and at that time species were regarded as fixed and incorruptible as of the day of creation and he had gone beyond where you should go and cross two species to make an artificial hybrid and he rarely thought his soul was in a mortal danger and in his will he asked that a sermon be read in the city of London each year and it still is and so an amazing man and this was the time when the first exotics were coming in you had the first apuntias coming in from the Caribbean you had the agaves coming in you had the first bananas things were really exciting for Fairchild and that that sort of tidal wave of plants just increased as you went into the 1800s and the 1900s and of course that was related to trade and just the sheer volume of shipping coming in and then the aggregation of wealth and people wanting to collect plants and so really it was the 19th century that started people ordinary folk buying plants for their house and the key thing there was the warden case where you could put them inside nice glazed box and protect them from the sooty urban atmosphere and then we had the sort of 1950s post-war boom again because central heating came in we had nurseries in this country like thomas rochford's that were growing new house plants festival of britain was promoting house plants and it was wealth and there was time for leisure could i have the next slide please this to me is the ultimate house plant this is the african violet st paulia from the mountains of tanzanere uh the usambara in particular and i think it's it's the ultimate house plant because it tells all the stories it was a colonial collection it was a german administrator in then german east africa in the usambara mountains he sent a packet of seed back to his dad in germany and he then sent the seed to a botanic garden nearby and that was then exhibited at a horticultural fair the material seed was then sent to america and it was in america that it became a focus of breeding and my dad had two had a scale for whether a plant is a good plant it was either an abomination or a bobby dazzler and depending where your tastes are the african violet spans that spectrum there's some you look at and go really that's just not necessary that should not be allowed um and so the americans kick started the african violets and eastern europe adopted the african violet so he always had a soviet phase of development and breeding of the african violets and if you go i traveled in russia um in the 80s and 90s and everywhere you went were african violets um and today the really pioneer breeders are in ukraine and russia and japan and in the 50s there was a whole phase of breeding using radiation to get new varieties and you would have atomic enriched african violets with atomically enriched potting compost that you could buy heaven knows what that resulted in so i'm a conservationist and i i work on conservation this to me is another story about houseplants tens of millions of african violets on kitchen shelves kitchen windows around the world the wild african violets in the uh cobbled rags of southern kenya in the mountains of the osambara and tanzania on the verge of extinction so you've got a the wild population collapsing and you've got this the horticultural derivative millions of dollars of trade each year and no benefit back to the wild so next one please it's almost christmas you'll forgive me for putting a poinsettia in there the other sort of official to me this is not a houseplant this is a rooted cutting that you buy you kill and you dispose of very few of these last beyond february or march and this again is a it's a south american plant it's a native of mexico it's a euphobia and it was named after poinsett who was an american diplomat who traveled through mexico in the 19th century and he collected material sent it back to philadelphia and there were materials from that collection at the very first philadelphia flower show in the 1860s i think poinsett didn't discover it it's an ancient sacred plant of the aztecs and virtually all the spanish colonial botanists saw it but poinsett collected it at a time when it could be distributed and when it could be adopted by horticulture and what we've done is we've converted a 15 20 foot straggly tree into a compact plant where we use day length and hormones to shrink the stem we've selected for color including what i regard as totally superfluous white varieties but that's a personal taste um and all that breeding has been done in california and the netherlands what is really interesting now is the mexicans have gone back they're looking at their native plants and there's a whole new school of poinsettia breeders in mexico developing mexican varieties and it's in parts of mexico there's a there's a phrase poinsettismo which means american bragging and it's named after poinsett so finally the grudge is being settled the mexicans are now taking back their plant and growing new varieties for sale in mexico city so my thesis is house plants are terrific fun house plants are good therapy they will not clear your flat of pollutants but they're a joy and there's a story behind each one of them that is a real surprise and i think in these days where we're living in increasingly crowded urban places we need those bits of green and we need those links back to the wild and back to other cultures so that's my love of house plants thanks very much and you got the two real experts sitting here well that was that was really fascinating and i i read something in one of the papers in the last couple of days a bit of a poinsettia scare story saying i can't remember exactly what the headline was but it was something along the lines of this plant could make your hair fall out which i thought was really quite you know scaremongering of course as you say poinsettia is a euphorbia common to that genus is that milky sap which if you've ever had an encounter with a garden euphorbia you may have experienced skin irritation as a result of that i did sort of dig around and found out i think there have been traditional medicinal uses of poinsettia and one of them which i didn't know about in mexico was as a depilatory as a hair remover and so i guess that's the basis of this idea that you might i don't know you'd have to rub it on your whole head i don't know how it would work but oh no no it did fascinate me that people were being urged not to grow this plant on the basis that it might you might lose your hair i mean you do have to be careful with obviously nibbling pets and indeed small children with any euphorbia but i never nibble my pets no indeed um and i think a lot of it that surprises people to know that many of the house plants that we grow uh are not something that you want to put in your mouth really i mean there are some ones that are eaten a few but not many don't eat them an interesting topic because we get it all the time no the the plant is poisonous you should not have it because it's dangerous but the reality is that most plants are not trying to to kill you basically if you choose on euphorbia probably you will taste horrible and you will just spit it out so even though it's toxic it's not i touch it and i die you know like in fact there is very few cases of intoxications perhaps the best example is the english you yes which is absolutely poisonous and yet pretty much you never hear of somebody dying of it because to ingest it you will have to probably process it somehow if you put that in your mouth it's terrible so so i i i tend to be more worried about physical damage like things like agaves which have big thorns and maybe can poke your eye or things like this and toxic plants for some reason there's a the different back here the dumb cane that many of us grow as a house plant is a is a is an example of a very storied plant around its its poisons so um it's originally from the rainforests of south america and the caribbean um the amerindian people used it as a poison for arrows to tip arrows when hunting then during the the brutal plantation era in the caribbean it was used to punish enslaved people hence the name dumb cane because it caused a swelling of the mouth and the tongue and it was horrible and then during the second world war the nazis experimented with it as a as a poison yet when you visit households in the amazon basin it's grown on every veranda as a plant to keep evil away and so it's it's an incredibly storied plant a very beautiful plant where there's whole uh you know a research team at the university of florida breeding new varieties yet it's got these um both sinister and benign characteristics wrapped into its identity and that to me is part of the fun of house plants they they they carry they carry legends they carry um stories with them uh but that is one i really would recommend you don't don't chew so i always find the deepenbeck here just not very easy to grow i'd rather have an aglianema which is another aroid from a different part of the world from southeast asia which i think is is more tall i find that more tolerant of uh house conditions uh and a bit less prone to turning into uh a stick uh yeah i mean i mean i think it perhaps it's just me but i i find the the deepenbeck it doesn't like my house at all um but yeah the aglianema seems to be a more more uh more adaptable to household conditions but you're right it's a huge the the dumb cane is just a massive massive i don't know what the production's like in in florida now but over the decades it has been just one of the premier house plants doesn't it yes and it really is uh and in the netherlands produced and it propagates very easily from cuttings so it's you can produce it it's very intolerant of cold drafts in the winter i think is part of the problem um doesn't like my house then and and i really wonder whether over the next five ten years we're going to see a shift in the plants we want to grow in our houses as we look at more cold tolerant house plants frankly we go back to those old favorites like um sysus antarctica the kangaroo vine or um even the little whitefly magnet selanum you know the winter cherry pseudo capsicastrum that's the one thank you yeah that's an interesting yeah and i think also i mean i'm hoping people are gonna fall back in love with things like uh well a couple of members of the saxophage family which are kind of out of favor i mean i did a whole chapter on one of them in my book just because i wanted people to grow them again so the strawberry saxophage and the piggyback plant almea men's easy eye which are very cold tolerant and i love both of those um and they do really well in in so if you yeah if you're looking for a sort of a fuel crisis houseplant and of course that's predistria we haven't mentioned that either but but then of course we have to remember that last summer we got 41 degrees true so it's quite interesting how we tend to react to to the weather apocalypse of the moment isn't it now winter is coming the weather has to be dropped because energy is expensive but then there is the problems with water there is the problems with heat which maybe i wonder if we should ask a question on what is a good houseplant isn't it and what it is not so is it good because it survives on neglect or is it good because it responds to love yeah i think it's good when they totally neglect really because we all have these kinds of crazy life traveling and at some point you will have to leave your plant alone for a few days the same paulia is a very good example we grow it in cucumbers and we kill sign paulias in a weekly basis and this is because we check them every day and then you have a hose and then triggering the hose and what happens very often and it's a plant that really needs you to forget about it and maybe as a man remember then just once a week at the very most isn't it so we tend to over water over watering them just out of too much gel it makes sense that makes a lot of sense in the wild the african violets often grow little limestone cliffs in the forest very much you know as lithophytes so they're not really in deep soil and we tend to grow them in pots are quite deep soil and some of them will go seasonally dormant the leaves will just go a little crispy and they'll sit there waiting for the wet season after two or three months in fact they some of them share a habitat with that wonderful thing at the end there the zamioculcas or zizi or zz depending where you're from which is always touted as the world's most indestructible houseplant and it probably is but that goes that lives in dry bushland and will have quite a bit of moisture for six months and they go totally dry for six months i don't know the answer to this but i'm wondering whether the ratio of epiphytes and lithophytes so plants that live on other plants mainly trees and plants that live on rocks compared to terrestrial plants the the ratio in the houseplant world is much more tipped in favor of the epiphytes than i mean i don't know in nature what proportion do the epiphytes and lithophytes make up of the because there are so many houseplants that are epiphytes and sometimes we don't really realize that or it's not something we possibly know about but it's a lot of houseplants isn't it usually you start looking it's interesting because most epiphytes they tend to be able to handle dry periods because they are up in a branch where there is a lot of wind yes direct sun that is on usually there is no a lot of light because they are generally growing a tree so that saves them and i i realized the other day that for example one habitat that makes amazing houseplants if plants are growing entrances of caves because at the end of the day your window is just like an entrance of a cave so the light comes only from one side taking a cave yourself from the wind like your house is and then things like that peperomia yes and things like this that is a very good spot to find good houseplants and that really is the key isn't it to to success is kind of understanding how your houseplant grows in the wild and then thinking about how you can try as best you can in your you know three bed semi well i live in a three bed semi anyway you can try to replicate those conditions so the one of the plants that i think i get the most questions about on my podcast is the string of pearls curio rollianus previously senesio rollianus and that plant just so often i get sent a photo of somebody's plant and it's kind of mushy and it's just a terrible mess that's kind of just rotted down and people sort of say well how why has this happened and you know when you look at how that plant grows in the wild uh it grows not as a string but as a mat we should be calling it mat of pearls which i guess that doesn't sound so good but you know the the string of pearls grows as a mat and those little wiry stems are rooting into little tiny pockets of soil on a rocky environment and therefore it doesn't really want to be in a plastic pot in highly moisture retentive substrate that you tend to have that's how you tend to buy it from the you know when you buy it that's what it's sold in in a plastic pot which doesn't in a plastic pot which doesn't allow any drainage doesn't allow any evaporation of moisture sometimes even in peat yeah so you've got all these issues already stacking up from the start and unless you know okay maybe this needs a different kind of substrate and unless you know to repot it into something much more free draining and to maybe give it a shallow pot and so on then you're sort of setting yourself up from for failure from the beginning um which is which is why you know it applies to all every house plant you grow if you do a little bit of digging avoid the pun i think you can find out useful pertinent information i mean again any succulent you know if it's it's going to be in a dark room north facing small window it's probably not going to be very happy ultimately because those plants are just designed for highlight aren't they yeah that's another problem that we tend to see not so much people which is really into house plants but the general public they tend to see the plants like a decoration object so this plant looks fantastic there but in fact this will be around here and in there you should put that one if it means it's like finding the right plant for the right spot yes and yet a plant that you like is difficult somehow especially i found here in the uk the angle of the sun fluctuates so much from summer to the winter that i i don't feel confident with leaving a planting a single spot ever i have to be always working summer every winter and this is not what you want if you want to have a kind of ikea house in which everything is perfectly set isn't it and then i guess that this has become a bit worse now with the coming of social media because you put pictures of plants out of context so maybe they are growing this plant inside the terrarium with led lights in high humidity and then just for the picture they put it there in the living room my favorite is when for example you see a picture of a living room and everything looks amazing and they have all these plants and you wonder yourself why in this house no single leaf is facing the window they are facing the camera so this is where everybody has been sitting there and then sometimes happens this thing of if you have a monster at this big it will block the light and then no more light no more plants will be able to thrive in there but then they have it somewhere else so then we all try to strive to get this perfect idea of a lifestyle with a jungle in the living room and sometimes it's possible but sometimes it's not depends on the tolerance of your family it does very true and i think i think light is really people sort of say oh you know the majority of house plants are killed by over watering but light really i mean all of these things are kind of connected it's a bit like a kind of a puppet on a string light water nutrients temperature relative humidity are all connected together and they're all kind of working in tandem and if you but if you don't have the right light you really are in trouble and most of the time i think most of the time it's it's not enough light people are underestimating light in there i overestimating rather the amount of light i got given a grow light last year for my for christmas and i've got a small set of house plants underneath it and i've got my new favorite house plant that is just thriving underneath this artificial light and it's a it's a purple leaf thing called ginura and i've had it before and it just looked as miserable as sin and now i've got the supplementary light on and it's thriving and the purple is accentuated so if you really want that sort of textual plant with an interesting leaf color ginura is one i'd recommend but it really does need that little bit of supplementary light particularly in the winter just to get it through but uh yeah i'm hooked on the on those lights now they do make a difference and it's interesting how a lot of that technology has fed through from uh the world of cannabis cannabis growing yeah cannabis growers developed a lot of the technology of hydroponics and led grow lights and well before led as well that has now kind of come through into the house plant business which is fascinating absolutely right um and uh yeah there's been it's quite set for worlds in one respect but also that technology has been adopted and uh yeah it's helped a lot of people with the house plants i suspect but you also write aquariums exactly yeah i was going to say this because then we you know the there is this um then alternative movement which is aquariums which in everybody's head is fish tanks but then the reality is many people grows for example aquatic plants or they grow even corals and then that has facilitated companies making much compact units which are much smaller than pleasing on the eye easy to install you can control all the parameters then people from the house plant they start then putting them in these things and then enter the terrarium thing which then that enables you to have humidity control because it's enclosed the light is can be regulated you can even inject co2 to increase them and then you can have a box like this week and have maybe a hundred species of small begonias and agronomias and then enables you to have it out of the window out of the toilet for the humidity and then you have the plants where you want them and i've seen some lovely versions of these called they call them palliudarians and things that we know as aquarium plants like the cryptocrinies and the anubias and the achinodorus grow very well with just a couple of inches of water and the supplementary like they flower yes um when they've got shallower water and the leaf colors on some of them the anubias fantastic so you can you can spend an awful lot of money very quickly on these palliudaria but they are pretty impressive and it also allows you to maybe have some shrimps in the water and some frogs on the bromeliads and then before you blink you have fun this is how it starts people this is how it starts you know you have no money and i guess that it all ties down into something which i call biophilia isn't it if it's if it's alive i like it yes and and then you know and for example it shows they see you that you mentioned before of your partner saying oh my god all these plants well they are now in a box you know like they are there and then they don't escape so you are the ruler of that box and and then you can you can really play with everything you know with the light the humidity the fertilizers frogs would cause me problems i think i'd be kicked out of the house especially when they start making noise at night doesn't it i mean it's interesting with the sort of the way that social media has framed literally framed the houseplant world in the last few years and i do have this theory that i mean i love flowering houseplants i'm probably a very small minority um but i love flowering houseplants and i think the reason why leafy houseplants have become more popular than flowering houseplants maybe you have other theories chaps but my theory is that it looks really good to have a leaf in a square you can you somehow it's easier to photograph a beautiful leaf in the instagram square than it is a god have you ever tried taking pictures of your garden and putting it on instagram it's really hard um and flowers as well don't look so something about the composition doesn't work and i wonder if it's something as basic as that i mean i'm constantly trying to champion people to grow more flowering houseplants and i did see a story saying you know next year's trend is flowering houseplants we heard it here first um but i yeah i think that has framed a lot and people now have this expectation and indeed it is the reality that they can go and see a plant on instagram and click click click they've ordered it and it's coming to them you know uh whereas in the past obviously it was a bit more torturous someone had to you know send off a stamped addressed envelope and that kind of thing but it there's an immediacy now which can have its benefits but i think also is quite dangerous because um there's an aspect of not buying a plant without necessarily doing that research i was talking about earlier and figuring out paying some extraordinary prices well it was seeing some um aeroids and aeroids do the aeroids the monstrous the collocases right they seem to generate a particular type of fanaticism yes um and so we're getting these stories of leaf sports of monstera 700 or 2000 dollars and people buying them as an investment so we're on the verge of the tulip crash with houseplants at the moment which i you know we we learned our lesson i think the dutch did a few hundred years ago on that but i was giggling the rail looking at the apparently in the victorian times having a pineapple was a symbol of wealth so people will go walking with a pineapple in the street so that everybody will see that they have a pineapple they will paint themselves and this is what is happening now with you could rent them for dinner parties isn't it yeah you could and then give it back the next day and this is almost what is happening with the monstera isn't it like you can now put a picture of yourself in instagram with this super expensive item which is your position of a status isn't it and we've really been here before with houseplants too i mean the kentia palm was the same you know you could rent a kentia palm or if you didn't have enough money to have a whole kentia palm you would buy a couple of fronds for your dinner table scene so you could at least have the sense that you had enough to have a couple of fronds of the kentia palm as opposed to having a whole plant and people used to have that plant and because their homes were quite dark and gloomy they used to send them on holiday to nurseries for a couple of months a year and they were hugely expensive absolutely cost a huge amount of money but they were a sign of you've made it you've got one of these this is you've really made achieved achieved something and of course that was the palm that the palm court was embodied by the the kentia palm they were on the titanic yeah and they were on the titanic yeah um so you know that it's a sort of a global symbol so we have kind of been here before with houseplants and i think you know like everything in life in life it's cyclical i wonder back to you know whether you know i don't know in medieval times where they was like oh the new trendy herb is rude and everyone's pretty ruined i don't know what what the um trendy plant of the of that far back was but it has happened over and over again hasn't it i can imagine there would be trendy herbs but there's stuff that we're now approaching which is completely new and i one of the things that intrigues me is is the is the science of breeding and developing new houseplants a hybridization was the big thing in the 18th and 19th centuries that was the revolutionary potentially sacrilegious thing to do now we're um entering an age of of genetic modification and there's just been a patent taken out on a modified skin dapsus that has been altered to absorb toxic fumes more effectively than the natural skin dapsus so do we accept genetically modified houseplants in our house or not and then you got groups at mit the massachusetts institute technology that are blending robots and plants so you've um it sounds absolutely horrendous they've got they've got these little um containerized plants on a basically what looks like a mccano wheelbase and they you can read there's there's sensors to for moisture and if it gets dry they will send you a text message uh so your plants are calling you uh you know just when we didn't we got used them as passive now they're going to be texting us saying feed us waters or what what some of the other guys they've done have programmed them to converge on water fountains to signal to be watered by the people having a cup of water so you're getting this um hybridization between plants and robotics and you're getting a sort of hybridization between plant structures and architectural structures so it's impossible to know whether planting stops and the building starts so i think there's some really interesting new areas that we're getting into um that i think are going to be really fascinating and we'll test our relationship with with plants i think the whole genetic modification thing will be one of those but i know that if you know the great plant breeders of the 19th century had access to glow in the dark plants which someone people are breeding they would have just snapped that up and we'd have had you know glow in the dark monkey puzzle trees in every victorian cemetery in the country you know there's what a wonderful image it's interesting in the moving back to the current thing in the u.s. industry they have a low in the dark fish yes that's right yes and they are totally bang in europe because the regulations are and we haven't mentioned tissue culture but we should of course mention that because that really has made reshaped the houseplant industry in that things like um napenthes the tropical picture plants which you know even like 20 years ago really you probably wouldn't be growing that if you were a normal kind of person you you you just wouldn't be able to afford it whereas now napenthes well you know a person who who didn't have a specialist set up if i can put it that way didn't have a huge budget whereas now you can walk into any pretty any much any garden center and pick up uh and the napenthes and that's because of tissue culture where labs are producing huge amounts of plants in that way and same for the aeroids i think as well and the and the orchids so if you look at the price of a phallinopsis the moth orchid the white beautiful white orchid that we buy as a houseplant that was 40 years ago a real connoisseur serious investment now it's cheaper than cut flowers yes and that's because of the selective breeding the tissue culture working out how to raise orchids um in vitro and then tracking cheap production so the a lot of the production of houseplants tracks cheap labor cheap sun and is not really sustainable so i lived for a number of years in florida now a vast nursery is growing houseplants there because you don't pay for the heating and the labor is cheap and so now houseplants that you might buy here may have been propagated in miami may have been propagated in thailand may have been grown on a bit in the netherlands uh and they've been finished off in the nursery over here so there's that huge global trade of moving pot plants houseplants around so do ask where this has come from and see where there's a way of and i know some companies are trying to get more homegrown uk grown pot plants because of the carbon cost of shipping these things all around the world yeah it's it's an issue that you know i talked about my podcast a lot and one of the things i always try to champion is well one of the things you can do also is be nosy like if you've got neighbors who live in the same kind of house that you do who happen to have some plants look at what grows well in their house nick a bit and then oh yeah then awesome for some knock on the door and say you've got that lovely begonia in your window i'm just wondering if i can have a cutting and most of the time people say yes and so there's a wonderful i mean a lot of my houseplants come from uh those kind of swaps and um those growing from seed and some other ways of growing doesn't have to necessarily involve uh financial transactions it's also a really great way to learn about houseplants by if growing something from a cutting or from seed you just you might go wrong but you do learn a lot and then going back to what you were saying about then its species has a history then you do your own history with this plant because what do you think anymore when you went to see the neighbor of your uncle and then it becomes a bit special no yes because you raised it from the beginning and there is a link to somebody on those on three but yes i remember some someone describing their houseplants are saying they lasted longer than my spouse did uh and then you've got multi-generational houseplants that move move down the generation so my family there's clivias that have gone and been split into various members of the family so we've all got the same clivia variety scattered uh and asper distra's i mean that's the other classic one i often hear from people who say oh yes this asper distra's been in the family for over a hundred years and my siblings and i have got uh divisions of it and uh i mean really that is it's coming back into fashion now actually the asper distra i think it is one a quintessential houseplant i mean going back to your point carlos about temperature differentials now that is one plant that can cope with zero and also high temperatures so that in a way makes it a really great houseplant um and yeah just so enduring i just can take all the neglect i guess the modern equivalent is the the zamiococcus which as you said is just super tough you know in the wild i think their technique for dealing with drought is just that they drop those leaflets but then those leaflets can if there is enough water then reproduce so um they're an incredible plant i think they're the i think i'm right in saying they're the only aroid they're a member of the arid family they're the only non-aquatic aroid that does something called cam i i always have to mention this until rassulation actually metabolism you can just throw that into a conversation great dinner party so it's a kind of a form of photosynthesis that plants which need to um cope with dry hot conditions use and um zamiococcus does that particular form of photosynthesis where it opens its breathing um holds it smarter at night time and does things differently to other plants so again yeah they're just it's that's why it's a really good plant i think you could kill it by drowning it i think you could yeah that's probably the only way if you if you had it sitting in water for a really long time but uh it's it's very durable and there's a nice purple leaf variety is it raven around at the moment that's a very pretty black yeah that's that's a lovely thing yeah there's a few there's i think there's a cream as ever with everything there's a cream variegated version that starts starting to come as well i knew you were gonna two two two um people who weren't gonna appreciate variegation which is a controversial issue in the world of house plants but you either love it or i'm i'm unusual i'm on the fence really with variegation i can cope with some but not others that variegation topic is quite interesting because that monster of variegata is decades old isn't he it's a super old plant in q gardens we have a whole wall of them yeah and then you know we're a botanic garden we should don't grow variegated plants so then they check it and we put like 26 000 kilometers of it on the container on the wing and like two months later then you start seeing them in instagram for 300 pounds but before probably yeah if we have throw it in the garden nobody will have bother because it's a bloody variegated plant you know it's like it becomes what it becomes the thing is a very difficult thing to to miss your autopredict isn't it i we're always looking for the new and the exotic when we if your house plant collector or house plant nut and you're always looking for that next great plant that's going to give you some pleasure and give you a little bit of bragging rights give you the the trading ability to go out and do some swaps that's that's that's the fun bit where you propagate stuff and say right can i do a swapsie there is an element too of you tend to want whatever you cannot have you know because if you really want a samikulkas or a spider plant your your crevice want to last 10 minutes because you go to the local tesco in the corner and then you get it and then because you have it you know that when you you can really have it you know so the worst thing that they can tell you with a plant is that you cannot have it automatically we all go it like why you know and then you need to you need to have it because i can't or because it's difficult to grow or rather than because it's easy to grow but that's what is exploring the darkest psyche of plant collect the sort of gothic side of denial that's why it's really interesting to dig and delve into the history of plants because what even with something like the humble spider plant when you actually look into its history and how it grows it is interesting i mean you may sort of we i think we're very sort of blasé about certain house plants and we just sort of they're just there and they're in our office or whatever but if you actually dig deep all plants are fascinating there's they're all doing incredible things and they're got incredible adaptations for their conditions and so i think that's one thing i would always say is rather than it's always very tempting to be like oh i've i've got to get my next one but it's really useful to kind of step back and say maybe i just need to really appreciate the ones i've got and learn more about them i mean i'm i'm trying to preach this to myself as much as anything else but um i'm always looking for that next amaryllis you know the hippie astrum because they're they're just great house plants and they flower and there's always new varieties coming out and yeah i got lack of willpower there that i have i mean on the poinsettia though i do is it going back to that plant well i might if i could get out one message it would be don't buy a poinsettia at christmas buy instead something like talking about epiphytes a christmas or thanksgiving cactus which will give you years if you look after years and years and years of amazing blooms and become become an heirloom plant whereas the poinsettia and whenever we talk about i think any anytime you talk about poinsettia there'll be somebody on social media who will say well my poinsettia has been going for 20 years and it's great and but most of us can't do that because it's as as we've already heard from mike it's a plant that just needs it's big and it needs day length to be triggered the right day length to trigger the color the bracts the colorful bracts but a christmas cactus is just a brilliant plant i can't speak of highly enough of that plant lovely cultivars yeah and i mean another example of an incredible history of this plant that started to be collected from south america in the early 1800s and just all this hybridization that occurred and the result today is this amazing sort of fruit salad of colors and shapes is quite interesting too because it's not very often said but with the poinsettia a part of the fact that it's not a very good house plant because it's more a conservatory plant a place where you have some light coming from different angles maybe perhaps on the route where the temperatures drop a little bit at night there is this thing which is quite clear to me it is plants like for example marantas and even poinsettia there is this birigamia and simnis this called hawaiian palm oh the brick brick hammy yes yeah and when you get them from the flower shop invariably they tend to die and if you manage to get one going for a longer time then the propagules from this one grow with no problem i believe is because they are forced and spoiled to that degree basically they have been in a glass house in which the light is controlled to the last photon the humidity to the fertilizer is coming to 10 every day the water is a raw water which doesn't have any salts everything is controlled in that they even put hormones so that they become compact and from that life of absolutely totally spoiled it goes into a conveyor belt it is locked in the dark into a warehouse in the netherlands takes two days to be sold to the distributor which put them in an airport and then they get flocked to europe and then they you know and then by then it gets to you this plant is just like looking nice but internally has a confusion that i mean it's totally lost and then what you do is you put it on the top of a radiator boom and then they hydrate it and then automatically sets all the leaves and they have like a crisis you know you have to restart and so sometimes i found even at key when we get it from a commercial source that you need to kind of treat it like a cutting repropagated and regrow these things because otherwise they collapse very good example is marantas in social media i always see how they really say they are so difficult oh my god not at all you know i have tons in q gardens and basically if you don't overwater it then they are happy but then you get it from the flowers up yeah no matter what you do it has a moment of collapse and hopefully regrow again hi hi everyone sorry so we haven't heard from tony so i think we're gonna um sorry about that yeah i think he may not be able to make it unfortunately but we've had loads of images sent in from people so the one might be quite nice to have a look at that and we could have some reactions is this one right my plant yes it marks out 10 hours so we can have the first slide please so this sort of brings me to a question i was having a lot of these images people have given them human names and i wondered if the panel had a thought as to why maybe that is i mean we always tend to emphasize things absolutely i i don't do that my my daughter has recently got into plants and so has my son and they give their plants names i've never done it apart from sort of slightly swearing names for plants that are tricky but it is something that i think a lot of people like to do and i think it's great if it makes you pay more attention to your plant like the main thing about looking after a plant is observation like are you looking really looking not just you know glancing at it but actually really looking at a plant and that's how you learn about it learn its habits and so if giving it a name i mean i love the fact this one's called triphony that's amazing well done alex um i think that's that's a that's a great thing and it's looking pretty good it's looking great yeah i mean no brown tips on that it's um i mean i don't know if it's just come out of the nursery or whether it's a long standing from my side i just would say that that is what we do in kyu gardens giving plants name all the time you do that's very i mean very unscientific no it is not it's the scientific name you know just keeping up with the changes on tax on oh yes yeah i'm not sure that is well that's very true that is very true and people people are very offended by the fact that oh here we are and now jacina but this is alex again so we've got the xamia culcass we've got there nice little terrarium and i guess that's a pylir of some sort i'm guessing that is yes pylir pephromiodes pephromiodes yeah i mean i'm gonna have to have a lot a little word with alex about the cactus in a terrarium no alex don't do that to yourself really no i mean i know it's very popular but if you want to set yourself up for success with the terrarium don't put a cactus into it unless you can't get into it unless you put the light but we should also say sorry that we can also take questions from the audience and questions online so do be thinking of your questions if you have any let's keep going through here's another one i mean tradoscantia are a brilliant plant family for house plants prolific i think one of the the factors that's common to so many house plants is they're easy to reproduce so this is one of these plants that's handed around cuttings are handed around and you can literally i mean if you can't root a tradoscantia cutting then yeah it's time to give up so but it's a brilliant plant and this one's obviously come from a family member so yeah yeah it's looking great and it's best if you do something with so many house plants it's best if you do take lots of cuttings because that helps the plants stay more compact that's clearly a very good house plant species isn't it i like plum that's the other nice thing as well the amount of people who've been saying stories of intergenerational or they've kind of inherited the plants so there's this really nice connection through the generations which is really nice and sometimes you get particular plants tracking particular communities so in miami the cuban diaspora grow a certain set of house plants that remind them of home so amazing this is a good one somebody's money tree is it a money plant yeah from grandfather yeah i mean this is a really interesting plant because it has you know global it really is a global house plant in that it's ascribed lots of different meanings in different parts of the world and i did read something it's very popular with feng shui practitioners i did read an american feng shui practitioner who said that you should put a $50 note under your money plant and it would kind of literally i don't know how quite how this worked but somehow that would bring you more money at your own peril try yeah i mean i don't know yeah you just might lose the $50 but yeah maybe you just find the 50 pounds later on yeah exactly you feel happy yeah nice that's a really nice story another cactus that looks like a mammal area i would say it's a mammal area yeah i mean i do think cacti are wonderful house plants and sometimes people do say um this hasn't grown for the past 10 years and you look at it and you go that's because it's dead because you haven't ordered it you do need to water cacti i think that's something people get wrong but i love that part and hopefully there's some drainage in there that allows that to not get waterlogged because that's the other thing you you dry them off in the winter and then they go into active growth in the spring in the summer but they still can't be waterlogged i'm just hoping that he put it next to the books to make a link with the british library otherwise it will be as close as you can add to the window to the sun yes and rot is in issues isn't it with cactuses yes you don't want to they can rot very easily oh hang on too far oh we've got yolanda the yucca a nice bit of alliteration there in the name yes that's a really nice jungle corner yeah nice by the window getting lots of light coming through yeah distance and the radiator yeah and this is kind of implicit but what about well-being obviously they bring us a lot of joy people have personal connections whether they've inherited them or they've given them these fun names can you say anything about well-being and and that side of things what go on no well i was just gonna say there are focus for activity there's something you can look at every day you can pick over and look for insect pests you can pick the yellow leaves off they're an attention grabbing thing that allows you just to step out of your daily routine and and you know puta just yeah not screen based yeah and i wonder if it happens to you i think they are also a kind of thermometer of your mental status when you're happy and you're kind of like connected and trying to do something then you look after your plants but when you're really fed up with everything you just don't see them you know you are worried and your mind is somewhere else's you're scaring me now yeah you know it's it's i found this quite interesting with with any kind of plant or maybe if you have a an aquarium or something if you realize that you are not interested into it then that's not your best day and one of the things i always try to fight back against is and it's such a common statement that you can't have too many plants and that isn't true because you can have too many plants if you get to the point where you're looking at your plant collection and it's making you stressed because you realize there's 10 things that need repotting um and the you know things are failing because you just don't have the time to maintain then you've got too many plants and so again i sort of counsel people to look at their existing collection you know do a bit of a Marie condo if it's not bringing you joy maybe find somebody else to look after that plant and retain the ones that really make you excited and they may be different from the plants that other people are enjoying and that brings you more happiness doing it that way than feeling overwhelmed because you've just gone out and bought another 50 plants with the yucca my my son's got one and he's wants to grow it up to the ceiling and and across and i keep telling him no we need to to chop it back you don't need to be afraid of chopping these yuccas back because they will resprout and give you a nice healthy regrowth so don't feel that you've got to let them push the plaster off the ceiling they can be can be tamed that's an interesting point too isn't it because there is two things to a plant in my opinion one is the species and the other one is the specimen i am always more interested in to having the species and to having the specimen which ties a little bit with what you were saying like sometimes you have three plants and they are humongous and they take your room one after you can have maybe a hundred and they are that size in some sense you have a hundred plants but then you could buy a tenth of what a single plant occupies and there's this amazing stat in your book i think it's towards the end about how what percentage of the population will be urbanized in i think it's like 2040 or 2050 maybe and it's it staggered me when i read it there's it's like a massive proportion of people will be living in urban environments so what do you think obviously house plants maybe will then be one of the only sort of connections to nature accessible to i fear that could be the case if we don't get urban planning sorted out with access to public parks etc little oases like that will be our our vehicle to sanity because we're just going to be in such crowded conditions and i was going to say that this interesting too because basically most of us is going to be living in a town but actually about half of the planet is now being cultivated or constructed so there is no space for these plants in the wild either so it's a double game isn't it like you can benefit from having plants in the house and also you can provide a place for them to grow now what's this one uh the famous spider pants speedy speedy spidey i must say most of my spider plants just constant babies everywhere i'm constantly repotting but it's nice this is a it's all people forget it's actually type of lily and there's different species most of them from south and eastern africa there's lots of different chlorophyte and some of them have got the most wonderful yellow and orange flowers so if you look at the range of chlorophyte in in kenya and tanzania so i think there's really potentially interesting breeding that could be done to have them as a flowering plant and they you'll find almost like a bulb underneath them where they go dormant and and dry off and there's there's a super new um chlorophyte and hybrid doing the rounds um i've forgotten its name with the orange leaves i know what you mean i can't think of it either my mind's gone blank too anyway we'll we'll remember as we walk out this evening but is breeding something people could do at home if we have any like amateur breeders or do you need a lab and you need all this equipment it's something you could sort of as a hobbyist you could turn your hand at there's a lot of great house plants being bred by hobbyists yes and i would really encourage you if there's a plant you love play with it see whether you can generate new cultivars from seed all right it may not make you millions but it will give you a huge amount of satisfaction and fun and african violets are one um i know an amateur breeder of streptocarpus and begonias yes a lot of people breed begonias so yeah it's certainly something you could breeding is not just plant breeding is not just for the professional it's something that we should all have yeah that's exciting because i feel like a lot of people it's sort of just trying to prevent your plant from dying but this idea of creating something new yeah it's a whole different sort of angle on it which is actually really interesting nice and there's so many house plants also if you don't want to go quite as far as breeding you know you can grow a lot of house plants from seed and every year on my podcast we do a seed sowing project and you know you can grow everything from the swiss cheese plant monster deliciosa to streptocarpus to uh lots of cacti and succulents and they're actually quite easy to grow from seed and fun you end up with lots of plants you can choose the best for yourself and give the rest away which is delightful so and a little seedling cacti i like little gummy bears they're really cute the little seedlings okay weeping fig yeah this is nice yeah wally the weeping fig another inherited plant oh a house warming gift from 30 years ago fantastic that's really nice they carry memories as well obviously we get them as gifts it's going to seven foot tall amazing and what do you guys think about these apps there's lots of these apps now aren't there to help you breed are you more instinctive do you just sort of look at your plants attend to them and they're giving you the signals to what they need or do you have these apps and there's everything beeps and notifies you i think if you find them a useful tool some some apps can be useful and there's apps for absolutely everything from plant identification to recording information about your plant or detecting problems if it's going to make you spend more time looking at your plant then it's good but don't take that as your only source of information i mean i guess i'm old school i love looking at old house book and you know you can use it so many different resources so that could be one part of your sort of tools i think there is that side of it that i don't like which is actually the fun is figuring out that yes for me if that makes sense and i hope we don't get into an alexa water my plants you know kind of a scenario i think it's nice to have things automated like for example light or perhaps eventually watering when you go away but i will be very stressed now if i have a message now telling me there is this plant and it's dying you have to get home you know i i think part of the fun of it is working it out you know yes absolutely like why is growing more now is this because there is more light is this because i water it less is this because i put fertilizer and then that is a very important part of of it and i had a swiss cheese plant that um it said it should be in like a bright moist environment so i put it in the bathroom and it just really wasn't happy and i think in in the end it went outside on a windowsill just in a pot and then suddenly this very long vine came dangling down and one leaf came out so then i moved it into a completely different part of my house on the mantle piece which was relatively dry and dusty and not you know not humid at all and it's thriving there even though the care instructions said bright humid so sometimes the plastic label okay i mean oftentimes the plastic label just says foliage plant which i mean and i've come across plastic labels where it's a cactus and it says you know cactus can throw or throw away after flowering another one i mean you know so don't buy another one yeah that's the deal yes don't don't believe what's written on the the label and also you know the best house wants like the swiss cheese plant are just incredibly tough and incredibly adaptable that's why they make good house plants as opposed to something that is going to just have very very specific needs and so yeah it will cope with all kinds of things yeah it's really interesting because it says in our humid place you know if well at a home humid will be 50 percent humidity but if you gardens will be 95 yes yes so this is buccania the ponytail palm from mexico this is actually um buccano i think this is recovata and that's highly endangered in the wild um but all of our stock that you buy in garden centers in this country come from propagation from the far east or canary islands but it this is as tough as it gets this is a real old boots plant it takes even a bit of frost too yes it does surprising yeah the problem with this plant as a house plant is that the base of these bulbs it has in the base in the wild they're like this big and they go up five meters so you are always died by space but still it has a good house plant especially to have a sunny spot and these these cordycephal fat or fat plants as they're often called now are kind of want a very trendy thing and there that there's a whole group of these plants which are very very popular you need to be a little bit careful not really with this but with some of the cordycephal plants that are coming um onto the market where there are issues to do with where they're coming from are they being taken from habitat because as you can imagine if you've got a large cordycephal plant um how long does that take to actually grow in a nursery quite a long time so we do need to be a bit aware of where our plants are coming from particularly with these new trends for particular types of plants um because we can unwittingly be tech be fueling a plant being taken from their habitat which is a very important point to make isn't it because you could be participating in criminal activity so to speak but also you can risk criminalizing the plant growers which i think we should not do either like for example this monstera which was worth 500 pounds for after cutting that is a totally it doesn't exist in a while you know it's a sport that has created in has been created in cultivation and then because there is high demand they have high prices but for example um many other cacti which there is only to have been collected in the wild they are now grown by seed in fact many like the quinoa cactus grusoni it doesn't even exist in the wild anymore it's gone yeah it's tiny population so there is plenty of plants that you can grow no wind that is not going to be collected where there is other groups of plants that you should be really careful so is there something people can look out for like an equivalent of fair trade for plants or is it just a kind of I wish it was that straightforward unfortunately we'll go to a good supplier i mean you ask questions ask questions about where plants are coming from my advice will be the minute it gets into the expensive side then try to check out where it is being produced if that makes sense it could be expensive just because you know has to be shipped from a nursery in the Netherlands and it comes in a 100 kilo spot or it could be as expensive because it's rip off from the wild and then smuggle into the country and no worries it's also worth joining plant societies if you get really into a particular kind of plant like a cacti for example or aeroids join a plant society and ask questions of the experts there and ask those people well you know what's the conservation status of this plant where can i buy it responsibly and that way you'll enhance your own knowledge support those plant societies and also that means that you're hopefully finding some good answers about those kind of questions as well go to the shows and quiz the the nurseries at the specialist shows i think Carlos is right there's a lot of the stuff that we're buying as houseplants are bulk produced by the tens of thousands and there's they're not from the wild but as you go into that's a little bit more expensive collectors area and there are still collectors out there who want the wild collected orchid the wild collected cactus the wild collected pacipodium and they will pay good money for that bad money and that's where you can quite often um unwittingly purchase something that's been wild collected so it's something something to watch for and always ask if you're you're in doubt and there are a few paradoxes out there too like you know busephalandra there's a kind of plant that grows in rivers and that can be grown out of the water and 10 years ago there was only one species then suddenly it becomes a trend so people was starting to rip it off from the wild but then they start selling them under very strange names that nobody could work out and then suddenly one of the experts start looking at it and as a result of the plant trade so they're like 60 species were identified that we didn't know otherwise because nobody cares about these plants until this thing happened and interestingly three of them were already extinct and only survived because they were poached before somebody chopped the forest so that's that's the internet trade isn't it that yes um whereas i think your garden center trade is probably very well regulated but once you go into the wild west of buying specialist plants on on the internet you're then going into a different world and you do need to be very careful there i wonder if we have any questions from the audience um yeah if you raise your hand and wait for a mic and i think jane and karl are so particularly good at the care perhaps side of things and mic maybe more about the history any particular we've also got some more images i think so some nice orchids there i mean i always whenever i sort of do a houseplant talk i'm always very disappointed if somebody doesn't ask me a question about how to get their phalanopsis orchid to reflower because that is the number one somebody going to ask that question anyone want to know the answer that question i can tell me well i mean uh going back to my previous point about toughness of plants phalanopsis particularly as a result of all this breeding that's gone on um has now become this mass plant that is everywhere and they are very well suited to our homes they like the the they don't they don't re not really bothered about hugely high humidity and they can cope with the temperature in our homes so they're very very tolerant um and they flower for a very long time uh and they will reflower and the advice always used to be well you need to get a tempera different temperature differential between day and night in order to spark them into flowering again i'm not sure how much that's true anymore because there's been so much breeding that i don't necessarily think that always is the key but the main thing with with phalanopsis is just make sure they're getting enough light and that you are keeping them healthy and once that flower stem has stopped the flowers have dropped off you can either cut it back to the base or you can cut it back to a node which is a kind of a scaly point on that stem and if you do that you may get some extra flowers coming off that existing flower stem if you cut it to the base it takes a bit longer but you get more flowers as a result um you need to feed them well they then their nutrient needs are quite small i mean they're another yet another epiphytic plant yes um so their nutrient needs considering the incredible flowers they produce are actually quite small but if you aren't going to feed all kids then do use specialist feed don't just give them um a leafy house plant feed because they on the whole it's easier just use orchid feed yeah use normal feed but that's a much longer time yeah i'll just reduce but yeah exactly so all kids are wonderful and uh and easy so i try to enjoy the leaves in between the flowers the leaves i know they're not very exciting but i like the leaves i have a question um can anyone remember their first house plan and was it particularly significant was it this sort of eureka moment or was it a disaster or was it something that really got you into botanicals what in my case when i was born my mother had two flower shops so i don't remember at what point on the mound of floristry ways i regain consciousness you know like it was always around they were always around them well i i yes and similarly i had plants from a very young age and used to go to jumble sales and pick up cacti and be given plants i do and i but i do remember at quite a young age there was a big in my sort of open plan 70s doctor surgery near my home was a big swiss cheese plant and i remember sitting waiting to see the doctor i'm just looking at this plant and just going wow what are all those roots for because you know a big a big monster will have a lot of aerial roots um you never see this on instagram but you know it's a spaghetti monster it's covered in these and i remember thinking what are they for and i'm on my earliest sort of house plant memories is thinking about that plant and wondering what all those roots were for um and i just yeah i've always always had plants really so i i know that lots of people have this moment when they perhaps get their own first home when they suddenly discover plants but for me it's kind of been in in my veins forever i think what about you yeah same here the the moment that gave me the click um i was given a packet of Sutton's mixed cactus seeds for Christmas and so there was the whole anticipation of waiting for the spring to sow them because we only had a very small heated uh seed box in the greenhouse and then watching these little green jelly babies sort of germinate and grow and um there was one of these rat tailed cactus that survived and grew and i had that for probably about 10 years afterwards that was a that would be a clinching moment is it cactus or cacti i've always wondered that one because i never quite know how to say it is i suppose that's a latin thing no plural cacti plural cacti okay yeah i always want to check that cactuses doesn't cactuses sound strange yeah it doesn't roll off the tongue but one of the things people often sort of get very worried about with plants is pronunciation of scientific names and i was i love scientific names but i always say it doesn't really matter if you go into a room with people plant people from different parts of the world you'll be talking about the same plant so using the scientific name and everybody will be pronouncing it differently is it clivia or clivia does it really matter no you know you know i mean okay a lot of americans have told me absolutely firmly that it's clivia i've always said clivia but anyway um don't worry about sounding silly because there's no romans around to tell you how latin is pronounced anymore no no but don't worry about it yeah but the e thing is every english thing to do isn't it i with a like ipo moe for example but then you don't say i in patience you say in patience it's all very confusing it makes no sense but don't worry about it just just dive in there and try this is the good thing of social media you just spell it and then everybody whatever they know what it sounds there's also all these amazing kind of folk names or you know like uh what's a silver ragwort but then it was called like the dusty miller was another name for it all these amazing images that come from the past perhaps when it wasn't latin or you know it wasn't so scientific and they're really great images which are quite amazing poetic in many ways absolutely yeah there's some amazing common and there's annoyingly there are some common names that are applied to dozens of different house plants like money plant yeah like bridal veil i mean bridal veil is about five different plants and so that's why the scientific latin is useful because that narrows it down and you actually know what you're talking about but you're right there are some brilliant common names and do you think that taps into because people talk a lot about plant blindness don't they that we we see you know to us a bush is just one big mass whereas actually there may be multiple species in there and perhaps to some of our ancestors who were more in tune with nature they might have had more knowledge of the individuals there and we've sort of lost that over time which kind of speaks to what you're saying about the money tree being this broad term what do you guys think about that it's something perhaps you may not experience because you're more expert but plant blindness is um evident at very different levels so at the highest level of conservation planning and policy you've got plant blindness because everyone's focused on on the mammals and the birds and the reptiles and then when people talk about wildlife I always say you're including plants in wildlife or you're excluding plants in wildlife and there's different answers and then there's the ability for us to read a plant and folk who've got house plants are actually able to read a plant and they can assess when it's drought droughty or about to flower or coming into a new new growth phase and that's reading a plant and that's combating plant blindness so like that is a very valuable thing there is all these areas also which are very interesting isn't it like if plants can have feelings or if plants can feel pain yes and it's very funny because for example plants kind of have feelings but I can tell you that this plant is very happy if that makes sense or if it doesn't have a feeling why is happy but then it's interesting the scale they operate you know they look like totally inanimate objects so then we don't even consider them to be alive somehow but then if you if you have house plants you realize the scale of time how it was passing and how they are actually they have a plan which is maybe getting into the toilet through the self towards the window and then now you want to use your sink or the slow motion footage of when you see and they're actually constantly waving and dancing almost and you see that then and it's it's very interesting you know there is this case of this plant from Chile and I don't remember the name it's a it's a climber and it shocked everybody when he was realized that when he grows into a syrup the leaves mimic the shape and the color of that syrup but then when he grows over the next one it changes but like a chameleon most yeah but most scientists then start thinking that perhaps it's because that plant can detect the chemicals of this plant and then it has a software which enables it to then mimic the plants of the environment until somebody went and did the experiment with a artificial plastic plant and guess what it changed to the shape of the plastic plant which is one of those croton like fake plants that first of all it's not a plant that second doesn't live in the high that's almost sea somehow so then it opens away for for plants being able to to see if you kind of imagine what it will mean seeing without eyes and even though the paper the paper has been published most scientists I saw it they go like I don't believe that because it's it's such a it will be such a kind of wow crazy idea for us yes so because that in my in my view it's also we have like a semantic problem with this you know like if I say now that plants think you know it will put me a straight jacket and then get me out but then if I ask you now define thinking what they're going to say if that makes sense for me thinking is analyzing data processing it and then take a decision based on that and clearly plans to it and they do it well they're clearly intelligent yes I really take comfort in the fact that I don't think they're too intelligent because they're sharing my house they might take over and I'm just happy that they're there is they're not commenting it's a bit little shop of horrors yeah they're not sort of having a conversation when I'm not in the room let's just assume they're they're nice passive there was this thing as well I read though during lockdown when everybody was at home apparently the plants were happy were happier because there was more vibrations or there was music and there was company and then when everybody went back to the offices the plants seemed to be I don't know if that was scientific or well I can tell you that from the scientific point of view you will be putting more co2 into the room because you are there breathing and that will make them grow happier okay because it's just a chemical thing even yeah I go and going back to the point about observations oh you were there weren't you you were there observing your plant you spotted when it was wilting but it is it is true I mean like the the plant will grow faster if it has higher concentrations of co2 I notice I have an aquarium with corals and if I go away they grow faster because I don't breathe co2 and then that doesn't acidify the water so then that means that they can put more calcium I will be surprised that your co2 even though you are not going to purify and detoxify your house and produce oxygen enough to to make your hands very happier it is true that your co2 is going to make them happier yeah amazing well we've just reached half past so thanks so much for that conversation we had a few more images actually I wonder if we could just click through them this one's great some excellent names here the Never Never Plant named by Felicia Ivy called June the Dragon Tree is Sideshow Bob that's a really fantastic one again so anthropomorphicized but obviously a deep connection with them there's some lovely ones there on the window ledge now this is the famous Dolly from our office who was named after Dolly Parton because we didn't have it with her so that's a nice place to end but yes thanks so much to our panel tonight for this it's been a great conversation I hope you've all enjoyed it Mike's got his books available in the bookshop and we'll be doing a signing afterwards if you'd like to buy a copy and Jane and Carlos I believe both have books out if we search online is that correct my book's not out till next April okay so watch this space for Jane I think okay you should read it it's great okay amazing so there we go so some links to check out after the event but yeah thanks very much everyone for joining us yeah and hope good luck with all the house plants thank you very much