Veronica Sykes thinks of herself as a houseplant OG. “I was the plant nerd talking to friends’ parents at pizza parties in high school about their gardens,” she says. Around that time, she became her social circle’s resident plant expert, helping friends and family choose plants for their spaces and then keep them alive. Eventually, the Bay Area native was inspired to automate the process: One day while outside using her smartphone, she noticed her screen adjust to the light, and thought she could use that technology to help people with their indoor gardens. She launched her app, Florish, in 2017, and it’s been steadily growing since.
“We were a little bit ahead of the houseplant boom, and all these shops started coming out and selling a bunch of houseplants, and it was really perfectly timed for Florish,” says Sykes. Today, the indoor greenery market is exploding. The humble houseplant has taken over interior design and inspired internet communities (as well as multiple think pieces). Millennials’ interest in crowding their homes with fiddle-leaf fig trees and Monsteras has been well-documented; in the middle of this very digital, constantly connected era, a new generation is finding comfort in bringing the natural world inside.
The latest crop? Plant-related tech startups. Nurseries and indoor plant stores are reporting rising sales, and entrepreneurs have taken notice. A slew of on-demand plant delivery businesses are thriving: According to a recent Fast Company article, Greenery NYC, The Sill, and Bloomscape are just a few of the many, many companies racing to become the “Amazon of plants.” (A race, incidentally, that Amazon has perhaps already won.) These Postmates-for-houseplant models help users find and order indoor greenery with the same ease as takeout—or, in reality, nearly anything they desire. “These plant companies are a far cry from conventional suburban nurseries,” the Fast Company story explains. “Instead, they’re using many of the techniques that have helped companies like Casper, Away, and Glossier grow into retail powerhouses: convenience, branding, and experiential retail.”
On-demand order and delivery is a natural space for houseplant entrepreneurs to target, but the tech startup interest in the market extends beyond shopping logistics. Once those plants are in their homes, people need help taking care of them. The App Store is full of watering, care-reminder, and note-taking apps (such as Happy Plant, Plant Watering Reminder, and Waterbug) so users can keep track of their plants. For deeper insight, there are digital tools for analyzing the specifics of plants’ environments and customizing care plans. Planta (tagline: “never kill a plant again”) helps users create a digital catalog of their plants and explore new varieties; upgrade to premium ($7.99 for one month, $17.99 for three months, or $35.99 for 12 months), and Planta will use your smartphone camera to analyze your home’s light conditions to advise on future purchases, as well as grant access to Planta’s plant journal, plant care, and plant-guide tools.
Florish works similarly (though it’s free, and a little less fully featured than Planta). Its “wizard” tool scans the light in any given room to advise on what would thrive in that space. There’s also a quiz that can help with these suggestions. Sykes remembers the succulent craze that began around 2012—and also remembers the ensuing struggles. “There were all these people going, ‘Oh I thought you couldn’t kill them, they don’t need light,’ and putting them in a dark corner of a bathroom,” she says. Florish’s wizard tool will warn users if a corner is too dark, or suggest whether or not a certain plant is really best for their home. (It told me the corner of my spare bedroom really isn’t suitable for a Monstera and that I could try a pothos instead.) Sykes has a vision for how Florish and its community will grow; eventually, she imagines it being a one-stop shop for all things plant care.
Proving her app’s market potential was at first challenging for Sykes, but is becoming easier. “It’s shifted where earlier in the process, people would have to really wrap their head around the fact that, wait, people buy plants and this is something that a tech company can exist in,” she says. “This is a venture-capital-worthy business and now, having these same conversations 18 months later, I don’t think there are many people left that haven’t taken notice of this boom.” The bottom line: People are spending a ton of money on plants. They’re investing in them, and they need technology that can help keep them alive and thrive. “You take your car to a mechanic, your pet can’t feed itself. Plants are a responsibility, they’re really a unique possession in that sense,” explains Sykes. “I think about this a lot because it’s something that everybody wants, it’s aspirational, but there’s a real sense of there’s a burden. It’s on you to get the desired outcome.”
Alongside Florish in the “smarter” (or more tech-savvy) category of houseplant apps is Plant Optimizer, which was launched in May 2018 as a way to assess what exactly is wrong with users’ houseplants. The app, which costs $1.99, uses artificial intelligence to analyze users’ photos and tells them whether their plant babies aren’t getting enough light, too much light, or not enough water. Developer Chris Vukin told me via email that Plant Optimizer was launched along with a data set being created to identify cannabis plant disorders and harvesting times. The real focus of working on this technology, Vukin says, was for growing and harvesting cannabis, but the data set was broad enough to analyze houseplant health as well.
Plant Optimizer hit the App Store as something of an experiment, but Vukin now wants to build it out. “We have plans including incorporating the neural network in our web application that allows you to track your gardens, plants, and grow cycles along with getting alerts from image analysis done by the Plant Optimizer for helping you manage your garden,” he wrote.
Not all of the tech innovation in the houseplant industry is online; there is a real-life element being enabled by the internet. Horticure is a service that connects plant specialists to its users, either in their homes within 72 hours or via video consultations (it’s currently available in Berlin, Paris, London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, and New York). Their recommendations are customized to consumers’ needs for their plants, and tailored to their spaces. “Most of the specialists have degrees in horticulture, agriculture, or botany,” says Horticure founder Deborah Choi, mentioning that her company employs one specialist with a PhD in plant ecology. On average, Horticure specialists care for 50 plants in their own homes; some have as many as 200.
“I got the idea because, in many ways, I am the kind of customer we are addressing: I am a millennial working mom, and at the time I had about 15 plants in my home in various stages of death,” Choi says. “I wanted an easy way to keep them alive, without me spending a lot of time learning how to do so.” Choi, who is based in Berlin, says she wasn’t sure why the “Uber-for-everything” model hadn’t hit houseplants. “Americans and Europeans together spend about €32 billion [more than $36 billion] each year on house plants, and also throw away €8 billion [about $8.9 billion] worth annually as well,” she says. “There is a lot of growth in plant sales, but there is also a lot of waste—mostly because caring for houseplants is not intuitive, and takes time to develop the skill.”
In 2017, @laplantologie (who prefers to have only her Instagram handle published) learned this firsthand when she bought her first houseplant. “I [now] have 60 plants in my apartment and a dozen of cuttings that I am propagating, which I either cut from the ones I already have or swapped with some people,” she says. At first, @laplantologie needed app assistance; she says she used a water reminder app, but doesn’t remember the name of it. “I didn’t use it very long because you still do need to check if they actually need water or not, to always be looking at all of them closely, especially as a beginner,” she says. She still uses PlantSnap to identify unknown species, which she says is faster than asking someone on Facebook to ID something. She does, however, enjoy using Facebook for plant-swapping. She’s part of a group called Troque ta plante where members swap plants by meeting up or by mail. She’s even made friends through Troque ta plante.
Plant-swapping communities had organized online long before the houseplant hype began, but they’re increasing. Instagram and Facebook both host groups dedicated to these swaps, and Facebook Marketplace is full of people who propagate and sell houseplants. (Disclaimer: It’s where I bought my first philodendron and pothos.) There are also online social networks that exist entirely to fulfill users’ every plant need; the Australian-based Plant Life Balance is one of them. The community features a blog that explores the ins and outs of plant ownership, offers interior design tips, and also helps users find nurseries. Plant Life Balance also has an app, of course, which analyzes the health of your room (by calculating the improvement in air quality based on how many plants are in it), and also lets users drag and drop plants to digitally test them out in their homes.
Despite the wide variety of houseplant apps and tech, it’s becoming clear to the entrepreneurs in this space that most of these tools appeal to one type of gardener: a newbie. Sara Toufali is a plant influencer, if you will; she knows her way around a pothos and her Instagram is an homage to all things green and growing. Toufali tells me she uses iNaturalist and PictureThis to identify plants, but she doesn’t use watering or care reminder apps. “I find it’s better to stick a finger in the soil and see how dry it is, in addition to just looking at the plant’s leaves to see if it’s thirsty,” she says. “If you water on the same day every week automatically, you may end up over-watering and killing the plant!” Toufali makes a good point: Digital automation certainly allows users to turn their brains off a little and eschew personal learning and awareness for an app alert.
Sykes recognizes this gentle resistance to the appification of houseplants. After all, there is something a bit ironic about a tech scene developing around a hobby that’s supposed to help people disconnect. “The only pushback I’d say I’ve seen in the plant community is that there are some people who think, ‘OK, this is going to give people a false sense of confidence. It’s not that simple.’” All plants are different, even if they fit into a certain category, she says. Apps may also inhibit people from developing an intuition about caring for their plants, instead becoming overly reliant on technology for assistance. But Sykes thinks they provide a helping hand for novices who may otherwise become frustrated by wasting money on plants they keep killing.
For too long, Sykes has witnessed the flooding of Instagram comments and inboxes, including her own, with pleas for help, an incredibly inefficient method. “I know exactly the help people need. Here, just let me automate this for you guys so I can answer 10 years of questions from my DMs and texts!” she says. If anything, Florish and other apps like it relieve plant experts like herself from being overwhelmed by those of us suddenly covering our walls in philodendrons and ZZ plants, desperate to keep them alive.