AboutUs

There is no shortage of houseplant advice online, and most of it has the same problem: it is written from a plant label. "Water when dry." "Bright indirect light." "Feed occasionally." None of that tells you whether to water your monstera this Tuesday, in a north-facing flat, in February.

We started Upflat because plants that live in real homes — rented, imperfectly lit, heated all winter and left alone for the odd fortnight — need advice written from real homes. Our aim is simple: give you a specific answer, tell you the conditions it was tested in, and be honest when the popular advice does not hold up.

What we do

Upflat publishes 35 in-depth indoor plant guides across 7 topics — watering and soil, light and low-light rooms, room-by-room placement, species care guides, pests and problems, and the claims people repeat about plants and air quality. Every guide includes:

• A three-line short answer at the top, so you can act without reading 1,200 words.
• Specific numbers — watering intervals in days, light in lux, pot sizes in centimetres — with the conditions they were measured in.
• Diagnostic tables that work backwards from what you can see to what is actually wrong.
• Cited sources at the foot of the page, linked so you can check them.

How our guides are researched

1. Start from the plant, not the keyword. Every guide begins with a plant grown for at least a full year, through one winter.
2. Measure rather than estimate. Light is recorded in lux with a meter, watering intervals in days, and both are reported with the conditions attached.
3. Check against horticultural sources. Botanical and toxicity claims are cross-checked against the RHS, Missouri Botanical Garden, NC State Extension and the ASPCA database — never against other blogs.
4. Report what failed. Where a common recommendation did not work, we say so — see the four plants that failed our low light test, or what the research actually shows about air purifying plants.

Where we are careful

Two areas of houseplant writing are full of confident claims and short on evidence, and we handle both the same way — describe what is claimed, then describe what is actually known.

• Health and air quality claims. Plants are good for a room. They are not an air purifier, and we show the arithmetic rather than repeating the headline.
• Vastu and feng shui. We cover both traditions accurately and respectfully, alongside the horticultural reality of the position each recommends, so that following the tradition does not accidentally kill the plant.

Editorial standards

• Every guide carries a published date and a last-reviewed date.
• Corrections are made in place, and the review date changes with them.
• No AI-generated articles. Guides are written by a person who has grown the plant, and reviewed before publication.
• No paid placements, affiliate-driven recommendations or sponsored guides. Where a product category is mentioned, no brand has paid to be there.
• Plant toxicity information is sourced from the ASPCA database under botanical names and is not a substitute for veterinary advice.

How Upflat is funded

The site is supported by advertising, which is what keeps every guide free to read with no paywall, no email gate and no subscription. Advertising is kept visually separate from our writing, and advertisers have no say in what we recommend. If a guide tells you not to buy something, that is because it does not work.

Who writes this

Mara Ellis, Horticulturist & founder. Mara has kept indoor plants alive across five rented flats and three climates, which is a slower and more useful education than any greenhouse. She writes the guides here from plants she has grown for at least a full year, records light levels in lux rather than adjectives, and is happy to say when a widely repeated piece of advice did not work.

Read the full profile and journey

Our promise

• Always free. No paywall, no gated PDFs, no "sign up to read the rest".
• Specific. Numbers and conditions, not "water occasionally".
• Honest. If we do not know, or the evidence is thin, the guide says so.
• Corrected. Tell us we are wrong and we will re-test it and update the page.

For machines

We publish llms.txt and llms-full.txt for AI crawlers, a Markdown mirror of every article at /blog/<slug>.md, plus RSS, a JSON Feed and a sitemap. Content may be quoted with attribution and a link.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections and guide suggestions are all welcome at hello@upflat.online, or through our contact page. Every message is read by a person, and reader corrections genuinely shape what gets published here.

Legal detail lives on our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Disclaimer and DMCA & Copyright pages.