Millennials are filling their homes — and the void in their hearts — with houseplants
Blame it on Instagram
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Lavanya Ramanathan.
On Sunday mornings, Hilton Carter’s girlfriend makes herself scarce from their one-bedroom apartment in an old Baltimore mill.
It’s when Carter starts his four-hour grooming ritual.
Not his own, of course.
It’s for his plants. All 180 of them.
Carter, a 37-year-old artist, feeds and inspects and prunes and otherwise tends to the Great Dane of a fern cascading down above his bed. Every Sunday, there are yellowed leaves to pluck away and toss. Bugs to keep an eye out for. Tiny air plants to bathe. The great existential mysteries of light and air and sun to consider.
This is when he can fuss over the verdant monstera, trademark Swiss-cheese holes in its sprawling leaves, that sways gently in the breeze coming off the Jones Falls River just outside the window.
A short history of houseplants
“One of the first waves of houseplants was after the Industrial Revolution,” says Tovah Martin, author of several books on the subject, including “The Indestructible Houseplant” and “The Unexpected Houseplant.”
People were building and then moving into cities, she says, and they began to want to establish a sense of — forgive us — rootedness.
Martin has a theory about the houseplant revival of 2017.
In the 1970s, there was Watergate and war and turmoil in the Middle East, and housewives hung ivies, pothos and devil’s backbone from their macramé plant hangers. (“My grandma totally had all these plants,” Sellers says.)
“It’s very cyclical,” Martin says. “I think the current cycle has a lot to do with people hunkering down. A houseplant is therapeutic. It gives you something to nurture.”
There’s also another factor: Instagram.
The current millennial trend
Go on, search the hashtag #urbanjungle. Or #monsteramonday. Or #plantgang.
Tropicalia is finding its way indoors via Instagram. Even in drab gray concrete jungles such as Baltimore and New York, young people are turning their apartments into “house jungles.”
Carter’s plant-filled account has 33,000 followers (some of whom message him for plant tips, others asking whether they can just come see his urban jungle in person).
The holy grail of plants
The fiddle-leaf fig has achieved what is known in the Instagram universe as holy-grail status. But as with Pokémon, the plant-obsessed are collecting them all.
The buying habits of millennials, naturally, have a way of attracting attention. Shops have become wise to the growing number of novice green thumbs.
“This has caught on,” Carter says. “The nurseries have figured this out, the hardware stores have figured this out.”
For their plants, millennials prefer the terms:
#urbanrainforest
#jungalow
And filling your home with plants is “urban wildling.”
(In less enlightened times, we probably would have just called it “decorating.”)
Plant babies
“They’re each your own little baby,” says Joseph Wanek, 31, who lives in a midcentury house in Iowa with his partner, Nick Sellers, and at least 45 plants. “At first, Nick was not wanting me to bring them home,” says the prop stylist. “He was saying I was a plant hoarder.”
Nick came around.
“It became more and more of an obsession,” the 28-year-old art director confesses.
