Hello, I'm Jane Perrone and this is On the Ledge and I've got a new catchphrase, costing you money since 2017.

Listener complaints are mounting. You're all telling me that you're spending a fortune on plants and you're blaming me.

I am so sorry, not sorry,

because buying plants is one of life's great pleasures. I would urge you to make sure that you can

afford every plant that you buy, but hey, they're pretty cheap. Or you can always swap cuttings.

There are lots of ways to expand your collection without spending a load of money, but I love the fact that

you're all really investing in your plants and loving the show. Great to hear. If I say the word

palm to you, what do you think of? It first brings to my mind the magnificence of the palm house

at Kew Gardens, a monument to the Victorian passion for palms.

Then my mawander's to the dramatic art deco hotels with vaulted glass ceilings and towering

Kenji Palms. And I also think about the tiny parlour palms I brought in Woolworth as a kid and squeezed

into bottle gardens. Fast forward to 2018 and the palm remains one of our

most popular and persistent houseplants. And yet, and yet, is it just me? Or has the fiddly fig

somewhat stolen the palm's crown as the statement plant at the moment? I hope not because I think palms have an awful lot to

offer. I wanted to know what palms we should be growing and how best to look after these noble

plants. Over to someone whose Miami, Florida home is overrun with the things. My name is Scott Zona.

I'm a botanist based in Miami, Florida, and I specialize in palm. What's the most

common palm question that you get asked when, you know, you're at a dinner party and somebody

finds out you're into palms? What's the thing that, the first thing people tend to say to you,

why has my parlor palm died? No, actually, I think the first question I get is our palms trees. That's a classic one because of course here in Miami, we grow our palms, most of our palms outdoors. And so people make that distinction. It's sort of a meaningless distinction. I mean, they're vegan or what do you can call them trees if you want.

Botanists have really no actual definition of what is a tree. So we'll call them treaties.

I think a good place to start is, first of all, I want to clarify that I'm only going to be talking about through palms, things in the Palm family.

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