The Book
A few years ago I started keeping rare aroids at my home in the Bay Area — velvet anthuriums, black-leaf philodendrons, plants that by every reasonable measure should not survive a forced-air room thousands of miles from the cloud forest where they evolved. I kept them anyway. The leaves kept coming.
What started as a private record — notebooks, photographs, the humidity curve I'd defended for a year — turned into a book. Leaf People · Bay Area: Extraordinary foliage plants grown where they shouldn't. It is the most carefully made love letter to a hobby I have ever written. Photographed plant by plant. The genus-by-genus notes I wish I'd had at the beginning.
Leaf People — the app, this site, the field guide — is what came next. The book taught us depth beats breadth: pick five genera, learn them properly, write about them with the respect they deserve from the growers already keeping them alive. We are not going to be a thousand-species catalog. We are going to be the place a serious collector trusts.