Hello and welcome to On the Ledge podcast.

This is episode 151, the relaxation episode.

Thank you. The Relaxation episode. The This show is a chance for you to sit back, relax, perhaps surrounded by your favourite plants.

Maybe go to sleep. It's up to you. But if you're feeling stressed,

exhausted, or just in need of some respite, from the trials of life, I'm here for you. I'm going to be reading from the indoor gardener by Miss Malling published in 1863. It's a book about indoor gardening. Some of it may seem very strange.

Other parts will be very familiar. If you want to read along

with the text that I'm reading, you'll find the link in the show notes at Jane Perrone.com. And if

you're a Patreon subscriber, head over to my Patreon feed where you'll find an episode of an extra leaf where I talk about

some of the visualization techniques I use to relax and listen.

Let's begin. The Indoor Gardner by Miss Malling. Preface. This little work is intended as a very simple but

comprehensive guide to room and greenhouse plant growing for the use of those who are not already

gardeners and who therefore may wish to find the minutest points explained.

It is only a fellow feeling that can teach one to do this,

and thus the experience of one such gardener is often perhaps more useful here

than that of those great men who could never have tried to practice small ways of doing things.

The plants which I have treated of in this little book may some of them seem, at first sight,

to be too ambitious, but none are included which I have not grown or known to be grown successfully.

And even although so many of the plants are most beautiful,

they are not, on that account, at all, more hard to grow than many commoner flowers of which we now

see so much. Two chapters of the present work have already, in great part, appeared in a little

pamphlet which is now out of print, and many of the others are

also in part reprinted by the kind permission of Dr. Lindley from The Gardner's Chronicle,

...