For years I threw away food scraps with low-grade guilt and no alternative. Composting felt like something that required a garden, ideally a large one, and possibly a certain kind of personality that enjoyed turning piles of organic matter in the rain. Then I discovered that composting in a small apartment is not only possible …

The first cutting I propagated in water was a pothos stem I snipped off impulsively while repotting. I put it in a glass of water on the kitchen windowsill, forgot about it for two weeks, and came back to find a tangle of white roots growing from the node. That was three years ago. I …

My bedroom has one window that faces a narrow internal courtyard. Opening it in summer means street noise and warm air from the building below. Keeping it closed means waking up with that particular stuffiness that comes from sleeping in a room that hasn’t breathed properly overnight. I started adding plants not primarily for aesthetics …

The summer I decided to grow tomatoes on my small sunny balcony, a neighbour looked at my two small pots with polite scepticism. By August, I was sharing tomatoes with her. Not many, but real ones, warm from the sun, with that particular depth of flavour that supermarket tomatoes have spent decades trying to approximate. …

I killed three succulents in a row. Three. Succulents, widely described as the houseplant you cannot kill. After the third one, I stopped blaming myself and started looking at the actual problem: I was watering inconsistently, either too much or too little, with no reliable way to know which. Self-watering pots solved this so completely …

In a studio apartment, every surface does multiple jobs. The desk is also the dining table. The sofa is also the reading chair. The bedroom is also the living room. Creating a plant corner in this context isn’t just about adding greenery, it’s about carving out one small part of the room that feels intentional, …

My first apartment had one north-facing window in the main room. I placed a fiddle leaf fig there because it looked beautiful in the shop and the label said ‘bright indirect light.’ Within six weeks it had dropped every leaf it owned and stood bare and accusatory in the corner. I tried again with a …

A small balcony in a cold European city, Berlin, Stockholm, Edinburgh, Vienna, doesn’t seem like much of a garden. Short summers, unpredictable springs, winters that arrive before you’ve put the summer furniture away. I spent two years looking at my balcony as a place to store things I didn’t want inside, before I started treating …

Counter space in a small rental kitchen is precious. Floor space is even more so. But the walls? Walls are almost always completely ignored — and in a rental where drilling is forbidden, they feel impossible to use. What I discovered, after two failed attempts and one very understanding landlord, is that you don’t need …

If you live in a northern European city, you already know the light situation. Grey skies from October to March, narrow streets that swallow what little sun exists, and apartment windows that face courtyards or brick walls. I spent three winters in Amsterdam convinced that houseplants simply weren’t for people like me, until I discovered …