Anybody who knows me, knows my relationship with houseplants is frosty at best. I try very hard to keep them alive. I even water them. But invariably I overwater or underwater or leave them in a draft or give them too much light or too little light or…you name it, I can kill it. I can even kill cacti and succulents.

The trouble is I really love fresh flowers and plants in the house! Once again, however, I hit a snag – I’m impatient and wandering about my garden with a willow basket and secateurs snipping flowers like a lovelorn heroine from a Jane Austen novel doesn’t fit with my schedule and neither does the tidy up when they finally do make it to a vase and they’re past their best.

So I decided to fake it. Faux flowers began to sneak into our home, then it was winter twigs. Leafless and gnarled, even I couldn’t kill off something that already looked dead! And now, with the threat of a takeover by fakes and the nearly-dead, my houseplants have decided to flourish!

Dead or alive, faux or real – can you tell?