We began building this library in earnest around a year ago. It has since grown to roughly one hundred volumes featuring a mix of Victorian and Edwardian houseplant manuals, stove and hothouse books, bound gardening periodicals, and more specialist texts on tropical foliage and orchids that we regularly return to at the nursery.
The intention has never been to create a decorative wall of beautiful old books (as tempting as that might be). The aim is something more practical. A working library. A place where a question about plants under glass can be met with an answer that is older, sometimes stranger, often more grounded in lived experience, and occasionally more useful than what can be found online.
Not always, of course. These books are not infallible. They can be outdated, inconsistent, overly confident, and shaped by the limitations and biases of their time. But that, too, is part of their value. They offer a record of how growers thought, experimented, failed, and refined their understanding.
What’s on the shelves
The collection broadly falls into four areas, though in practice they often overlap.
The first covers indoor plant growing before “houseplants” existed as a defined category. These are books written for parlours, balconies, and window sills—spaces heated by coal and lit by gas. The conditions were far from ideal: smoky, dry, inconsistent. And yet, they are remarkably relevant.
Growers of the time had to pay close attention. There were no grow lights, no heat mats, no humidity monitors. If a plant declined, the response wasn’t to search—it was to observe. Was the air stale? Too cold at night? Had the compost soured? Was watering based on need, or simply routine?
While some advice now feels dated, much of it remains deeply useful—particularly the emphasis on patience, observation, and working with imperfect domestic conditions, which is still how most plants are grown today.
The second area focuses on the heated glasshouse: stove and hothouse plants, orchids, palms, ferns, and tropical foliage. These texts document growers working with many of the same plants we handle today, often under far more challenging conditions.
What stands out is the immediacy of the writing. When a grower describes managing a Caladium through a London winter, it is not a recycled care guide—it is direct experience. Observed, tested, and recorded. That kind of insight remains invaluable.
The third area is made up of periodicals—bound volumes of nineteenth-century gardening magazines. These are perhaps the most overlooked and most alive. They are full of debate, discovery, disagreement, and personality.
New plants arrive. Names are contested. One grower succeeds, another fails. Letters are written, arguments unfold, and editors respond with confidence and conviction. They reveal horticulture not as a fixed body of knowledge, but as an ongoing conversation—which, in truth, it still is.
The fourth area is specialist literature, particularly on aroids. These are working references: monographs, botanical treatments, and taxonomic texts. Less casual reading, but foundational. They explain not just how to grow a plant, but why it is what it is—context that underpins much of what we share about specific genera.
What these books teach
There are three things this library offers that are difficult to replicate elsewhere.
First, a depth of practical cultivation knowledge from people who had to make things work. Growing tropical plants in the nineteenth century came with little margin for error. The result is advice that is often more nuanced than modern care summaries—covering rest periods, seasonal shifts, and the interplay between light, temperature, airflow, and soil.
A recurring theme, for example, is the importance of rest. Many plants were understood to have natural cycles—periods of dormancy or slower growth. Today, plants are often expected to remain consistently lush and active. But if a Caladium dies back in autumn, that may not be a failure. It may be behaving exactly as it should.
Second, these books document what was actually in cultivation. Historical plant lists and botanical records reveal a far broader and more fluid landscape than we often assume. Many plants have been renamed, reclassified, or temporarily lost from mainstream growing. These texts help trace those lineages and explain why certain plants feel both new and familiar at the same time.
Third, they offer permission to disagree. Unlike modern care content, which often presents itself as definitive, these books frequently contradict one another. Different growers, different methods, different outcomes.
That inconsistency is not a weakness but rather a reminder that horticulture is a practice, not a fixed set of rules. It encourages experimentation, observation, and confidence in one’s own growing conditions.
Why not just use the internet?
Digital tools are indispensable. We rely on them every day. They are fast, searchable, and effective at synthesising accessible information.
But they are limited by what has been digitised. A significant portion of horticultural knowledge (especially detailed, experience-based writing) still exists only in print. If it isn’t scanned, indexed, or shared, it remains effectively invisible.
Part of the motivation behind building this library is to keep that material active: read, referenced, and applied. Not as authority, but as evidence.
It also feeds directly into how we work here at GrowTropicals. Whether that’s planning a display, refining propagation, or writing care guidance. The plants themselves haven’t changed as much as we might think. In many cases, we are still learning from those who grew them before us.
What this means for growing at home
There’s no expectation to build a library of antique plant books.
But it does suggest that the way plant care is often presented today. Plants don’t respond to summaries. They respond to conditions.
The most valuable shift these books encourage is simple: to look more closely. To notice changes. To understand that care is not something completed, but something ongoing.
If your experience of plants has come primarily through care sheets or social media, this perspective can be transformative. It creates space for adjustment, curiosity, and a more intuitive way of growing.
Where this is going
For now, the library lives at our founder's home, gradually expanding across a growing wall of shelves. It is used, not displayed. Books move between shelf and workspace as needed.
Over time, it will continue to shape how we grow, design, and share knowledge.
The collection will keep expanding: deeper into specialist plant groups, wider across historical periodicals, and further back into earlier horticultural writing. There is still a great deal to uncover.
And as with any library, its value grows through use and exchange. If there are books, collections, or inherited volumes worth exploring, we’re always interested to hear about them.