Ideas for novels come from all kinds of strange little crevices in the brain. But this one was a little bit different. I was chatting to a friend, Hazel, who’d just moved into our area on Glasgow’s Southside. ‘Did you know there’s a houseplant hospital near here?’ she asked.
This snagged my interest. A houseplant hospital! I understood the idea – you take your ailing houseplant there and it’s nurtured back to full health. But what kind of place was it? And who was the magical person who could rescue the sickest, most desiccated of plants?
Being an (unintentional) killer of houseplants it really grabbed my imagination. So I looked the place up – Fox Botanics, it’s called – and saw that Helen, who runs it, holds monthly open weekends at her home and garden, where the magic happens.
I took myself round there at the first opportunity.
It was obvious which house it was, as people were leaving clutching plants. I stepped inside the beautiful Victorian terraced house, which was milling people people. In the hallway shelves were filled with packets of her home blended potting composts. A gorgeous bathroom, with original tiles and fittings, was a mini showroom for plants.
In the living room a table was filled with greenery, and yet more houseplants and cacti were crammed into the kitchen.
On these open weekends Helen does a plant sale, and trendy young people were cooing over the beautiful houseplants of all varieties.
My brain was whirring. I really wanted to write a book about a woman who runs a houseplant hospital! I didn’t quite know why – just that it seemed fascinating.
I chatted to Helen, who looked a bit startled when I blurted out that I’m an author, and would love to interview her sometime about her work. But we arranged for me to do that, and we sat for a couple of hours in her lovely back garden. As she told me how she’d started – by potting up little cuttings during lockdown – my story took shape.
I started to think: why would my character Celia love plants so much? Because they comfort her, and she feels safe surrounded by greenery after a difficult upbringing and a terrible thing that happened to her at the age of eighteen. And because they demand nothing of her and – usually – will not let her down.
None of this is Helen’s story. She just generously shared her own story with me, how her houseplant hospital grew from very small beginnings, when we were all stuck at home and the world felt very strange.
The idea flew and I loved writing The Woman Who Got Her Spark Back. So that’s how the novel sprouted and grew in my mind.
Like most stories – and the variegated ivy which I took home from Helen’s that day – it all started with a tiny seed.
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