Not Another Jungle: Comprehensive Care for Extraordinary Houseplants

Product Information

The store in Northampton town centre receives customers from all over the world - as far away as Nigeria and Canada. After teaching himself how to grow indoor plants and becoming a prolific collector, Tony has learned better than most not all advice on maintaining plants rings true. “There is some advice out there that isn’t always based on facts,” he warns.

Oh, well. It's lovely. Well done. It's fantastic. So congratulations, Tony and I'm sure you'll get a fabulous response from people who do go out and invest in a copy. I'm looking at 90 plus percent humidity here on the care information, I'm thinking, yeah, that's going to be a challenge. Absolutely, it is a recipe for disaster. We've all been there. We've all been there. Well it's, I'm really excited that this book is come to fruition and is there anything else you want to tell me about it before we end this interview? Is there anything else that we need to immediately turn to on, I mean that the cover we should talk a little bit about the cover. The cover is nice and very you. So I think, well, the reason it's been successful for me is because I forgot I had it for a long time I stopped. I got it from I can't remember how many years ago, but I got it a while ago and I grew it from tiny little few tiny little leaves in the sandwich bag. Rogier said don't experiment with it, just leave it in a sandwich bag and put it somewhere that's very low light, and not too warm. Because I think a lot of people think Malaysia's warm, let's put it in the warm and they just rot, they melt.You're looking at, you're wiping down that plant with great love. That's all I can say about that picture. But miraculously, its flower opened on the day of the shoot. And the Corybas caudatas is an extremely rare orchid, which my wonderful friend Rogier had bottled it to hold aside and gifted to me a while ago. And he has it and not many people around the world have it at all. In Peninsular Malaysia where it's from, it's thought extinct. There were subsequent trips out there to try and find it and it's never been found again. So I love rare things and I know people shy away from saying I like it because it's rare. A part of this plant's fascination is its rarity, you know, it's incredibly rare. And I grow this on my windowsill in a sandwich bag. And that is what fascinate that's the fascination, also just trying to be successful, but it's so rare and I know Kews been gifted some of this before and it unfortunately died and trying to be successful with this plant, trying to propagate it. That's a huge, not only responsibility, but challenge. And that's why I'm fascinated with it. And then when it flowered for the, for the on the day of the shoot, we were like, 'We have to get this in'. I want to share it with people and show it to people. More from Tony Le-Britton shortly but now I'm going to talk a little about my book, Legends Of The Leaf. Now the great thing about these two books, in my humble opinion is that they are really complimentary. They don't cover much of the same ground really because they're very different books, but I think the two of them together give you a really fascinating insight into houseplants. So I hope you'll maybe go out and buy both. But let me tell you, as I've been doing every week in the run up to the launch of my book, another fact from Legends Of The Leaf, this week's fact concerns Dionaea muscipula, the venus flytrap. And the thing about the venus flytrap is, it doesn't really trap flies. Well, not many, certainly when it's growing in its native coastal climbs in North and South Carolina, in the United States. Most of the things it eats, according to people who have done surveys of its traps, are things that dwell on the ground, beetles, spiders, things that crawl rather than things that fly, which kind of makes sense. When you see one of these in the wild, and you see the position of the traps on the ground, it does seem rational that things would be climbing into them rather than flying into them. Well I'm gonna bring you some amazing gesneriads. But you know. What is it about, this is what's fascinating about houseplants, though, is that for one person, something could just spark off this incredible reaction in away, you're absolutely fascinated. And I'm sure when I read the text here, I'll probably be fascinated to. You've literally given me the book about half an hour ago, so I haven't had the chance to read it. But tell me about this particular orchid and why it's in here and what it offers us in terms of being a fascinating plant. It was just another thing to do. Initially, I was going to do the photos. Because I want to have that creative control because newsflash, I'm very controlling when it comes to having the book.

The myth is that people think when you put it into water, the plant is absorbing the water it wants and the roots are basically taking up the water. That’s not the case. The soil is absorbing all the water. And then from there, the roots sometimes take up water from the substrate.

Map

The Ledge End tier gives you access to two extra episodes a month, known as An Extra Leaf, as well as ad-free versions of the main podcast on weeks where there’s a paid advertising spot, and access to occasional patron-only Zoom sessions. Key types are the banana skin, used as houseplant fertiliser. He says: “Bananas have loads of potassium, and people think that means their plants are going to get loads of potassium. This is so wrong. Even if it [the skin] did have lots of potassium – which it doesn’t – that’s not what plants need. If plants are going to grow healthily, they need a balanced fertiliser and different plants require different levels of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium)." Tony’s desert island plant: Anything from the alocasia family as they produce big leaves which you can shelter under and you can eat the tubers!