Let’s look around your home. Do you any plants growing inside? Your house might feel cosy and homely but imagine what it would feel like with some indoor plants living inside!

In How Not to Kill Your Plant the authors take us by the hand and guide us through learning to look after indoor plants. We learn the basics of care to start. We’ll need soil, pots, a cloth and a sprayer, among other things. We need to choose the right plant for the room it will live in, There are all sorts of things to consider to help our plant be happy. We need to know what plants like to be watered from the top and which prefer to take water from the bottom, like cacti. Light is especially key for a healthy happy plant. The amount of light needed can vary from plant to plant.

We’re ready to choose our indoor plant. What should we look for? We need to be careful to ensure we buy a healthy plant. Where should we go? There’s a suggested list of popular indoor plants in the book to choose from, each with information the meaning of its name and place of origin, as well as instructions on how to care for it.

This is a great book for young budding gardeners who would like to start growing plants inside. The book has US spelling which might annoy some, but the information is all relevant no matter where you live. The plants are universal as well.

It’s well organised, very informative, and the illustrations support the text to help us learn and stay engaged. It would be an excellent teaching tool for the classroom as well for home.

Highly recommended.

Reviewed by Emily Ross

Age Guide 6+

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Magda Gargulakova has a degree in Art History and is a co-founder and also curator of the OFF/FORMAT gallery in Brno, Czech Republic, which exhibits and promotes contemporary progressive art, mostly by young artists. She worked for a time in marketing, but her love affair with books has been a long one. For OFF/FORMAT, she has edited and published several art publications. Since 2019, she has added to this experience as an editor of literature for very young readers at Albatros Media, using her two daughters for quality control.

Lenka Chytilova was drawn to books and writing from a young age. It was no surprise, then, when she got a degree in Czech Language and Literature and German Translation. She has always tried to connect books and reading, her greatest hobby, with her work; she worked part-time in a bookshop for many years and she also worked as an editor and proofreader. Lenka likes classic Czech fairytales, and she loves Večerníček, the Czech television program for children’s bedtime stories. She grew up in a village in East Moravia.

Hannah Abbo is a self-taught illustrator originally from Brighton, UK. When she’s not drawing, she loves making ceramics, visiting botanical gardens, and growing vegetables. She currently lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal, with her partner and child, their (slightly) overweight cat, and 15 houseplants.