From Where I Stand — This past summer, I found myself at one of my
friend’s houses for a backyard BBQ. I was looking through the window at a gorgeous collection of plants. Their leaves were shiny and in every shade of green. Gorgeous white flowers popped. The branches were meticulously pruned. I wondered if the homeowners did the maintenance themselves or had a professional who tended to the foliage. Now for the weird part. I wasn’t inside their house looking out into the backyard, I was outside of their house looking into their living room. Yes, this couple had invested hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours into their houseplants. Houseplants are having a renaissance. Houseplants sales are up 50% in the last three years. They are now a $1.7 billion industry and it’s impossible to turn on an HGTV show or flip through a design magazine without seeing houseplants nestled in every corner. Normally, millennials and social media are blamed for all of society’s ills, but in this case, the opposite is true. Both are being credited for the revival of a market once left for dead. It’s no longer anachronistic to see green houseplants dangling from macramé hangers in college dorm rooms or trendy studio apartments. What’s old is new again. It is doubly strange to be of an age where you remember the trends of the 70’s and 80’s while still being tangentially interested in keeping up with them. I am sure that in ten years I won’t care if Sony Walkmen and Rubik’s Cubes become popular again because I will be stuck in my ways and culturally ambivalent. For now, I still care about what the kids are wearing, watching and listening to. I am mostly annoyed and threatened by new trends, but I feel that is the normal, default response as we age. Many of my friends’ parents tended to houseplants. I remember moms waltzing about their homes while Phil Donahue played in the background. They’d have a spray bottle in the one hand and a Tab in the other. Some of my friends’ houses became overgrown jungles as vines and ferns burst out of their containers and cascaded downward. These waxy plants merely got in the way of our lifestyle. They encroached on my designated spaces for Atari and Hungry, Hungry Hippos. Yet, hell hath no fury like an angry mom who rushed downstairs to see an overturned houseplant and five boys hiding a football behind their backs. I’ll be completely honest, I never really “got” houseplants at the time. I was constantly being reminded to water them when I got home with the glass RC Cola bottle we kept by the sink. They never made me breathe easier. I don’t remember a wild mood swing when a houseplant bloomed or died. They were like boring, lifeless pets that my parents doted over. At least my dumb fish wriggled back and forth a bit. Annually, I attend the Independent Garden Center Show in Chicago. This is a national gathering of garden center retailers. ILCA doesn’t delve much into the garden center arena, but I attend for different reasons. Garden centers tend to be ahead of most of the trends. They exist in an extremely competitive market since the advent of big box stores and have to take a number of risks to maintain a healthy customer base. Usually, what I see trending at the IGC Show will make its debut in the commercial and residential landscape market a few years later in some shape or form.
This year, the hot IGC topics were houseplants and cannabis, which, I guess is just a different kind of houseplant. I wandered around for most of the afternoon trying desperately to figure out how to implement both of these into the landscape market. Cannabis is a topic for another column, but it doesn’t take a marketing genius to understand its rise in popularity. The more challenging question is how do we learn lessons from this unexpected boom in the houseplant market. Perhaps, the factors that led to the surge in the popularity of houseplants can translate over to exterior landscaping. The succulent is credited as being the gateway drug to the houseplant market. Writer April Long (what a great name for a garden writer) called succulents, “The plant kingdom’s first bona fide social media star.” Succulents led to terrariums, terrariums led to fiddle-leaf figs, and fiddle-leaf figs led to any glossy, comically broad-leafed plant in an Instagrammable white pot. The theory of why houseplants took off is fourfold. The first aspect is that millennials love them and appear to be a more nurturing generation than they get credit for as long as what they are nurturing isn’t a human baby. Millennials have lower fertility rates than previous generations, but apparently love to raise plants and pets. A 2016 National Garden Survey concluded that of the six million people who had taken up gardening that year— both indoors and out—five million were millennials. Millennials outpace Boomers and Xers on pet ownership by about 10% and 95% consider their pets actual members of the family. The second aspect is that houseplants infuse a tiny shred of nature into lives dominated by screens and walls. There are both real and psychosomatic benefits to connecting with nature. Eclectic use of natural materials are seeping into the interior design aesthetic and houseplants are the perfect fit to soften cold spaces. Third, they are easy to maintain and there are low risks to neglect. A browning houseplant may lead to a frown, but waiting one more day to water one isn’t the same as being out all night with a Labradoodle or child at home. Houseplants are a stoic and durable companion during an era of our lives when it’s difficult to be tied down. Finally, let’s face it, houseplants are kinda cute. They aren’t showy containers or majestic trees, but they have a girl next door quality. They are photogenic and offer plant owners an ironic sense of pride. Sure, it’s just a plant, but there is genuine joy in seeing it grow and prosper. That pride eventually ends up on social media profiles and in “oohs” and “aahs” at backyard BBQs. So, can exterior landscape professionals capitalize on this burgeoning love of houseplants or is this simply a silly fad that happens to involve plants? Houseplants could’ve been storm lanterns or floor poofs or ceramic deer heads or any of the other design fads working their way through the zeitgeist. Let’s look at the criteria: they provide their owners a sense of nurture and nature, they are easy to maintain, and they are ironically cute enough to generate pride of ownership usually reserved for dogs and kids. Using those criteria, landscaping hits on half the marks. Landscapes allow us to nurture and provide us with nature. However, landscapes are not easy to maintain unless we use professionals and there is a stark difference about Instagramming a containerized houseplant versus a $45,000 patio. One is
The Outdoor Houseplant
The Landscape Contractor October 2019
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