The Kew Gardener's Guide to Growing Houseplants
Joyce, D. · 2020 · Frances Lincoln
- Edition
- 1st
- ISBN
- 9780711243958
- Pages
- 144
- Tier
- Recommended
- Audience
- For beginners
- Rating
- 3.5 / 5
There is a category of book that is impossible to dislike and difficult to love. The Kew Gardener’s Guide to Growing Houseplants is squarely in it. David Joyce has written a primer that is accurate, restrained, and very evidently the product of decades at the Royal Botanic Gardens — and the experience reads more like a well-prepared lecture than a conversation. You will learn things. You will not be entertained by them.
For a houseplant beginner, this is not a bad trade. For an intermediate or specialist reader looking for the next layer of depth, it is a book to consult rather than to read.
What it argues
The book’s organising principle is that houseplant failure is almost always traceable to four mistakes — wrong light, wrong watering, wrong substrate, wrong winter — and that getting these four right resolves most of what beginners struggle with. Joyce devotes the opening fifty pages to building this framework, then applies it consistently across fifty plant profiles in the second half.
This is the right framework. It is the same framework that more recent houseplant writing has converged on (with minor terminological variation). What dates Joyce slightly is the assumption that the reader’s primary failure mode is neglect rather than overcare — modern beginners, in my experience, kill more plants by overwatering anxious attention than by forgetting them entirely. The book doesn’t quite have the language for this.
How it’s structured
- Foundations (~50pp): light, water, soil, feeding, propagation, problems
- Plant profiles (~80pp): fifty species in alphabetical order, ~1–2 pages each
- Glossary + index (~14pp)
Each plant profile follows the same template — image, key data block (light, water, temperature, humidity), prose care notes, a “watch out for” section. The consistency is the book’s main strength: once you’ve read three profiles, you know exactly where to find any information in the next forty-seven.
Where it’s right
The Monstera entry in particular has held up better than most. Joyce notes the role of aerial roots and vertical supports in encouraging larger fenestrated leaves — a point that most beginner books miss entirely. He is honest about the species’ light requirements and unambiguous about the relationship between light deprivation and small, unsplit leaves. This is the section that earns the book its standing citation in our Monstera Care UK guide.
The propagation chapter is similarly solid. Joyce distinguishes between cutting, division, and offset propagation cleanly, and the diagrams (line drawings rather than photographs) are clear enough to follow without a parallel text.
The light chapter — perhaps the most important in any houseplant book — is accurate if conservative. Joyce’s “bright indirect” is calibrated about half a stop brighter than some popular American houseplant writing suggests, which I think is correct for UK conditions specifically.
Where it’s incomplete
The book’s age is starting to show in three places:
Variety coverage. The fifty species are the mainstream of 2019–2020 houseplant taste — Monstera deliciosa, Ficus lyrata, Sansevieria trifasciata, the calathea genus generically. Pink Princess philodendron, Calathea White Fusion, the variegated Monstera albo market, the rare-aroid scene that exploded post-pandemic — none of it is here. For a 2020 publication this is understandable; for a 2026 reference it is a real gap.
UK specificity. Frances Lincoln is a British publisher and the Royal Botanic Gardens is in Kew, but the book is curiously non-specific about UK conditions. Hard water gets a sentence. UK winter light gets a paragraph. Central heating gets a passing mention. A book this institutionally British could have made the UK-condition framing central; instead it reads more like a generic international houseplant book that happens to come from a British publisher.
No outward links. There is no bibliography, no recommended-further-reading section, no academic citations. For a Kew publication, this is the strangest omission — the institution has a research library and the book closes its own door rather than opening any others. Compare this to the same publisher’s RHS Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers, which is densely interlinked with both internal and external references.
Who should read it
Beginners. Anyone in their first year of houseplant care will get clean, principle-led answers to the questions they’re most likely to ask. The 4-mistake framework alone is worth the cover price.
Intermediates will find the species coverage too thin and the writing too restrained. They’ve already heard most of what Joyce is saying, just in more personable voices elsewhere.
Specialists will use it the way I do — as a reliable Kew-stamped citation point for principles that are uncontroversial, rather than as a source of new information.
How we use it
This book appears in the footnote of our Monstera Care UK guide, supporting the claim that aerial-root training on a moss pole encourages larger fenestrated leaves. It is the kind of reference whose presence in a footnote signals “this is settled horticulture” rather than “here is a fresh insight” — which is exactly the role a Kew-published book should play.
We expect to add citations to it in future guides on common houseplant propagation, light assessment, and care fundamentals. It is on the bench, not in the office.
The bottom line
A solidly competent beginner book that has aged better than the average — Joyce’s Kew credentials and editorial restraint mean nothing here will mislead you. What it won’t do is interest you very much, or send you somewhere else more interesting. For its price and the year it was published, this is acceptable. For the next edition we would like to see UK-condition specificity, a bibliography, and a few words written like Joyce was enjoying himself.
Reviewed 2026-05-25. Edition: 1st (2020). ISBN: 9780711243958.
- · Reliable principle-led structure across all fifty plants — light, water, feed, problems.
- · Notes on aerial roots and vertical supports for climbing aroids are unusually substantive for a beginner book.
- · RBG Kew authority backs up the recommendations — the methods are tested at scale on the largest collection in the country.
- · Compact, paperback format that survives bench-side use without falling apart.
- · Photography is editorially restrained — no over-saturated stock-shot maximalism, just clear identification photos.
- · The voice is institutional rather than personal — passes through information without animating it.
- · Skews to mainstream species — Pink Princess, White Fusion, the harder-to-find aroid cultivars don't appear.
- · Light treatment of UK-specific conditions despite the publisher being British — hard water, central heating, and winter light are mentioned but not dwelt on.
- · No bibliography, no further reading section — closes its own door rather than opening others.