Horticulture integrates science and practice in cultivating, designing, and maintaining landscapes and plant life. Interior landscaping is a similar activity that has evolved to serve commercial areas like offices, hotels, shopping malls, etc., and it requires selecting and maintaining plants. In 2024, total sales of horticultural specialty operations in the United States were estimated at $18.3 billion across 23,060 operations. Foliage plants for indoor or outdoor purposes were valued at $932 million, whereas potted flowering plants amounted to around $1.29 billion. These figures show the scale of the broader field in which technical horticultural writing and interior landscape services have operated.
Joelle Steele entered this field through formal training and practical work. She completed a vocational certificate in ornamental horticulture at Diablo College in Pleasant Hill, California, and another in interior design at Fullerton College in Fullerton, California. Her résumé records interior landscape and floral design work beginning in 1979 with Father Nature in Santa Monica. After relocating to Southern California, she also worked with landscape businesses. She later managed businesses related to landscape design, property management, and interior landscaping. Her professional experience included landscape design, property management, and consulting in these fields, giving her firsthand knowledge that later appeared in her books and trade articles.
From 1983, Steele worked as a writer for horticultural journals, consultant, and lecturer in landscape trades. Her work shifted from plant selection and care to the management side of the field. Steele discussed topics including contracts, marketing, employment, pricing, service accounts, and other business issues related to landscape and interior landscaping businesses. She was also a co-coordinator and instructor for an interior landscaping program at the University of California, Riverside, from about 1985 to 1998.During that time, she wrote trade books and managed businesses that helped interior landscapers. She developed educational material for people entering or managing horticultural service companies.
This practical background informed Steele’s The Interior Landscape Dictionary, published by Van Nostrand Reinhold in 1992, and later sold to Wiley & Sons. The book defines over 1,000 technical terms in interior landscaping. It is written for technicians and trainees involved in interior plant installations. It includes almost 130 illustrations, also by Steele, documented in bibliographic descriptions, and 70 photographs by others. In addition, the appendices include Latin and common plant nomenclature and the pronunciation of Latin names.
The dictionary was part of a wider body of horticultural publishing. Steele wrote or published material dealing with starting and marketing interior landscape businesses, indoor watering, plant maintenance, and plant identification. Titles associated with this work include How to Start Your Own Interior Landscape Business, How to Market Your Horticultural Services, Indoor Watering Techniques, Plantscaper’s Guide to Interior Landscape Maintenance, and the English & Spanish Guide to Interior Landscape Maintenance, which includes an illustrated English and Spanish dictionary. Her plant-specific references included The ABCs of Indoor Dracaenas and Other Related Foliage Plants, The ABCs of Indoor Ferns, The ABCs of Indoor Palm Trees, and Soils & Nutrients for Indoor Plants. A 2009 edition of Plantscaper’s Guide was accompanied by a Spanish edition, showing her bilingual approach to technical publishing.
Her horticultural writing also appeared in publications beyond her own books. Her publication record includes Interior Landscape Industry Magazine, Interior Plantscaper Newsletter News, House Plant Magazine, Horticulture Review, GrowingEdge, Canadian Gardening, California Landscape, and publications associated with the American Horticultural Society. Her articles addressed interior landscape business practices, plant care, landscape design, floral work, plant diseases, fertilizers, indoor foliage plants, and the history of the interior landscape and floral industries. This range placed her work between specialist trade writing and material intended for broader gardening audiences.
Business education recurred throughout this work. Steele wrote advice columns and articles for landscape professionals on contract management, maintenance accounts, purchasing firms, staff concerns, websites, and business economics. For example, in an advice article, Steele projected that about 6,200 firms provided interior landscape services in the United States in 2000. This figure could have supported more than 15,000 jobs, since most were small firms. These were Steele’s estimates, not government data, but they highlighted the kind of industry-related information Steele wrote about in her articles.
Teaching and lecturing extended the same approach. Her teaching in extended education began with a poetry-writing class at UCLA, followed by courses at Fullerton College on writing articles and books. In the Monterey Bay area, she taught at California State University, Monterey Bay from 1998 to 2003, covering how to make a living as a writer and genealogy.She began teaching in Washington State in 2006 and continued through 2026. At The Evergreen State College, she taught book writing, article writing, publishing, and genealogy from 2006 to 2008, until the extended education program was disbanded.
At Pierce College’s three campuses, she taught from 2006 to 2016, including classes in web design and HTML, writing, publishing, genealogy, art, landscape design, cat care, and introductory astrology.She taught at Centralia College from 2007 to 2026, primarily teaching writing, publishing, and genealogy. At Tacoma Community College, she taught writing and publishing courses in 2009, while South Seattle College hosted her writing, publishing, and genealogy classes from 2010 to 2013.Her earlier work at the University of California, Riverside also included serving as co-coordinator and instructor for an interior landscaping program from 1985 to 1988.Her teaching record therefore included horticulture alongside writing, publishing, genealogy, web design, landscape design, and other subjects.
The relationship between horticulture and publishing did not end after Steele moved to Washington State in 2005, when she focused more on books and digital publishing. Her later website still organized horticulture articles on landscape lighting, retaining walls, plant classification, leaf diseases, indoor plants, and floral design, among other topics. Horticulture therefore remained part of a broader publishing career in which practical experience, technical reference writing, business education, and visual communication stayed connected.
Across these activities, Steele’s horticultural career developed at the intersection of practice and publishing. Her training in ornamental horticulture and interior design preceded years of landscape and property-management work, followed by trade writing, teaching, reference publishing, and business education. The 1992 Interior Landscape Dictionary clearly illustrates this transition from practical industry experience to a formal reference work. Other books, bilingual maintenance material, trade articles, lectures, and educational courses extended the same professional focus. Taken together, these activities place Joelle Steele’s horticultural work within the wider history of interior landscaping and specialist publishing.
