This book is a practical guide to using preserved plants as a serious indoor design medium and as one element within a wider approach to biophilic design. It explores where real botanical material can add value to interior spaces, particularly where living plants would be difficult, wasteful or operationally demanding to sustain. Rather than treating preserved plants as decoration, it provides a clear framework for making better decisions about typology, placement, ownership, materiality, performance and long-term care.

The book distinguishes living, preserved and artificial vegetation, while arguing for coexistence rather than ideology: living plants where conditions genuinely support them, preserved plants where living systems would be forced, and other biophilic strategies where greenery is not the right answer.

It also addresses the practical realities behind successful projects, from light, heat and airflow to cleaning, ageing, refresh, documentation and assembly. Central to this is material honesty: understanding not only what people see, but what sits behind it. The result is a clearer, more responsible approach to specifying real botanical material indoors.