Indoor Green: Living with Plants (★★★☆☆)

Bree Claffey   *   Thames & Hudson   *   January 31, 2017   *   208 Pages

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I saw Indoor Green:  Living with Plants at my local library and didn’t hesitate to pick it up. I brought it home with me, fully expecting to fall in love, love, love…but it was actually kind of disappointing.

There are a ton of pictures of plants in this book, obviously, but the author’s main focus is actually the plant owners. Claffey devotes a lot of space to her interviews with each homeowner, most of them artists and designers living in Australia, Japan, and New York. The interviews are interesting enough, but 200 pages of small font question-answer–question-answer seems like overkill to me. I genuinely enjoy reading about how other people love their plants and feel more at peace and connected to the world because of them, but the book starts to drag around the halfway point. I just needed more variety.

It doesn’t help that the photography is lackluster, at best. I get the feeling that many of the spaces photographed for this book are probably stunning in real life, but the photos don’t do them justice. The pictures are dark and lifeless–and I can’t even believe how many are backlit! What’s the point of snapping a photo of a gorgeous plant…with a bright light source directly behind it? I don’t want to see a million pictures of shadowy leaves. It’s weird.

And though there are definitely some better pics in the book, I just wasn’t feeling it. I couldn’t get past the coldness.

So. Not my favorite. But if you’re looking for a beautiful book featuring flowers and plants, I’d recommend The Indestructible Houseplant, Urban Jungle, Succulents, or The Flower Workshop instead.