Hi, I’m Matt, the person behind Bean Growing.
I started this site a few years ago out of equal parts passion for plants and frustration with the gardening advice I kept finding online.
Most of it was either copied from somewhere else, written by someone who had clearly never actually grown the plant they were writing about, or so vague it could apply to any plant in any situation.
I wanted something more honest than that, practical advice from someone who is still learning, not someone pretending to be an expert.
I’m not a professional horticulturalist or a trained botanist. I’m an amateur gardener who got a bit obsessed with plants over the last few years, and Bean Growing is where I share what I’ve picked up along the way, including the mistakes, of which there have been many.
My Plants
My home is genuinely overrun with houseplants at this point, which my family tolerates with varying levels of patience.
Spider plants were the first houseplant I really got into. I bought one on a whim from a garden centre a few years back, put it on a sunny windowsill, and promptly killed it within two months by letting it sit in a saucer of water I kept forgetting to empty. Root rot.
I bought another one, made the same mistake, and killed that one too. The third one finally survived once I worked out what I was doing wrong, and since then I’ve had so many offshoots I’ve run out of people to give them to.
I now have spider plants in almost every room.
Monsteras are my other obsession. I bought my first one, a standard Monstera deliciosa, at what I thought was full size, only to discover it was actually a juvenile and the thing has not stopped growing since.
It now takes up an entire corner of the living room. I’ve learned more about fenestrations, light requirements, and aerial roots than I ever expected to.
I’ve since added a Monstera siltepecana and a Rhaphidophora tetrasperma to the collection, which I’m fairly sure is how plant addiction starts.
The garden is a more recent project. I’ve got a fatsia japonica that I nearly killed in its first summer by planting it in a spot that got more afternoon sun than I realised, the leaves went crispy and brown within weeks.
I moved it to a shadier spot, cut back the damaged growth, and it bounced back completely the following spring.
I’ve also got hydrangeas, a wisteria that took two years to flower, and the usual ongoing battle with whatever the local wildlife decides to dig up overnight.
Why I Started Bean Growing
The simple answer is that I kept making mistakes and couldn’t find straightforward explanations of why things were going wrong.
The first year I got seriously into houseplants, I managed to kill a peace lily, two spider plants, a pothos, and a dracaena in the space of about six months.
Every single one of them died from overwatering, the same mistake, repeated five times, because I genuinely did not understand that ‘water when the soil is dry’ means actually letting the soil dry out, not just waiting a few days.
When I finally started researching properly, I found a lot of articles that told me what to do but not why and the ‘why’ turned out to be the part that actually made things stick.
Once I understood that overwatering suffocates roots by cutting off oxygen, I never made that mistake again.
Bean Growing is my attempt to write the kind of articles I was looking for back then, practical, specific, and honest about the fact that plants die and things go wrong.
The goal has always been two things: to share what I genuinely enjoy about growing plants, and to help people avoid the mistakes I have already made.
If you’ve landed here because something is going wrong with one of your plants, I hope you find what you need.
What Bean Growing Covers
The site covers a broad range of gardening topics, but the areas I focus on most are:
- Houseplant care and troubleshooting – particularly diagnosing what is going wrong and why
- Common plant problems explained clearly – brown leaves, yellow leaves, drooping, dropping, root rot
- Outdoor plants and garden shrubs – especially shade-tolerant plants and UK-hardy specimens
- Seasonal garden care relevant to UK and US growers
- Growing from seed and plant propagation
I write from personal experience wherever I can. Where I haven’t personally grown or tested something, I say so and cross-reference with established sources including the Royal Horticultural Society.
I’d rather be honest about the limits of my knowledge than pretend otherwise.
A Note on Accuracy
I take what I publish seriously, even as an amateur. Before publishing anything on Bean Growing I cross-reference my own experience with reliable horticultural sources: the RHS, university extension resources, and specialist plant databases.
I try to make sure advice is specific to UK and US growing conditions where relevant, since a lot of gardening content online is written for American audiences and they don’t normally specify this.
If you ever spot something on the site that seems wrong or out of date, please get in touch, I would genuinely rather know and correct it.
Get in Touch
If you have a question about a plant, something on the site, or just want to talk plants, you can reach me on Pinterest
I’m also active on Pinterest where I share plant care tips, gardening ideas, and content from around the site. You can find Bean Growing at pinterest.com/beangrowing.
Writers: Mariel
For Bean Growing, we have an additional writer called Mariel.
Mariel is a plant enthusiast, writer, and self-confessed houseplant hoarder based in the UK.
She got into plants properly in her early twenties, initially just to brighten up a small flat and quickly discovered that keeping plants alive was more complicated than it looked.
Her first year involved a lot of yellowing leaves, a monstera that refused to grow, and at least one plant she is fairly certain she watered to death despite reading three separate articles telling her not to overwater.
A few years later and she has worked most of it out. Her flat is now home to a steadily expanding collection of indoor plants including monsteras, spider plants, pothos, and a fiddle leaf fig she is very proud of keeping alive for over two years.
She is particularly interested in diagnosing plant problems; the kind of specific, frustrating issues that send you searching the internet at 11pm wondering why your plant is dropping leaves again.
At Bean Growing, Mariel writes about houseplant care, common plant problems, and outdoor growing, with a focus on practical advice that works for people who are still learning.
She believes the best gardening content is honest about the fact that plants die sometimes, mistakes happen, and that is completely fine.