House Plants [antikvár]

Introduction House plants have been with us since ancient times. We might not go as far as suggesting that they are essential to human existence, but clearly they do fulfil a need: perhaps it has something to do with the way in which we enclose ourselves in architecture, fostering within us a deep yearning for the reassuring presence of nature. House plants may only be a token gesture in response to this, but it is none the less one that receives devoted attention from all those - professionals and non-professionals alike - who take an interest in the appearance of the places we live in. How desolate, we all think, a building looks without any greenery to set off the hard edge of the masonry; and how dry and inhospitable a hving room, no matter how exquisitely furnished, without some kind of house plants. It is probably no coincidence that the great boom in interest in house plants during the Victorian era coincided with rapid industriahzation and the massive expansion of the towns. Plant hunters, sometimes facing extraordinary hardships, trod the world in search of species that could be nurtured in the glasshouses of the wealthy and the smoke-filled, gas-ht parlours of the less well-to-do. House plants were in vogue, and the thirst for them was insatiable. We have inherited much of this tradition, not only in the way that we treat house plants as decoration, but also in that many of our house plants today are descendants or relatives - often carefully adapted or hybridized by the professional growers - of these highly-prized Victorian specimens. It was not of course simply the fascination for exotic things that had the plant hunters searching the tropical