Jane Perrone is a freelance journalist and houseplant expert.
With a background in news journalism, spending more than 20 years working in local newspapers, she then joined the Guardian as a reporter online, working her way up to an online news desk editor. In 2008, she became gardening editor at the Guardian, editing the gardens pages of Weekend magazine, making the Sow, Grow, Repeat podcast with Alys Fowler, and writing features, news stories and blogposts.
After leaving the Guardian in 2017 to become fully freelance, Jane is now the host of award-winning subscription podcast “On The Ledge” covering the world of houseplants from cacti and succulents to terrariums and ferns. Her email newsletter about houseplants, “The Plant Ledger”, comes out fortnightly. She is a member of the Garden Media Guild in the UK and the Royal Horticultural Society’s Advisory Committee on Houseplants. In fact, she writes a column on houseplants for the RHS magazine, The Garden, as well as for a range of publications, including the Guardian, the Financial Times, Garden Design Journal, Gardens Illustrated, The English Garden and Grow Your Own. Jane also gives talks and runs workshops to gardening groups and societies and gives interviews on the radio about houseplants and other gardening topics – everything from slugs to succulents.
Jane’s book, Legends of the Leaf profiles 25 iconic houseplants, charting their history and giving you tips to help them thrive in your home.
As a child, Jane cared for cacti in her bedroom and grew a grapefruit from seed; she filled a fish tank full of fittonias and brought African violets back from the dead. Jane likes growing houseplants inside, raising “weird veg” in her garden, and walking in the countryside with her hound Wolfie.
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