Easy Orchids: The Fail-Safe Guide to Growing Orchids Indoors

Pleasance Crawford is the co-author of The Canadian Landscape and Garden
History Directory and Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian Garden
Writing.

Liz Johnson is on a laudable mission. She wants people with little or no
experience to enjoy the orchids they buy or receive as gifts.
Accordingly, she limits this “fail-safe guide to growing orchids
indoors” to those whose cultivation she deems fairly simple and
straightforward.

The first third of the book consists of three short chapters on
choosing, tending, and displaying orchids, plus one on identifying and
solving common problems. Then comes Chapter 5, a 90-page directory in
which Johnson (with input from her company’s staff) discusses in
detail 85 species and cultivars. Each suggestion falls into one of three
ease-of-growth categories: easy, easy/intermediate, and “needs a
little attention.” The popular Phalaenopsis and Cymbidium genera are
well represented, as are some lesser-known and surprising options.

To keep the directory entries simple and concise, the book uses graphic
symbols to indicate ease of growth, plant height, preferred temperature,
preferred light level, fragrance, and flower size. It also explains each
symbol on an extended back flap. Thus, readers can easily eliminate
demanding orchids, tall orchids, scentless orchids, small-flowered
orchids, or whatever others they’ve decided—after studying the
earlier chapters—are not for them.

This useful book falls short in two ways. First, although most orchids
have distinctive forms and many have beautiful leaves, the colour photos
focus only on flowers that last just a few weeks or months. Second,
although the book was published simultaneously in England, the United
States, and Canada, its one-page list of “useful addresses” has no
Canadian content. Mention of the Canadian Orchid Congress (whose website
lists affiliated orchid societies in 10 provinces and orchid vendors in
nine) would make this book easier to recommend to Canadian readers.