WAY OF LIFE
HUW EVANS BOUGHT A BUNDLE OF HOUSEPLANTS FROM TRADE ME. THEY’VE GROWN INTO A PASSION THAT’S TAKING OVER HIS HOME, INSIDE AND OUT
Huw Evans’ passion is taking over his home, inside and out
THERE’S A JUNGLE unfurling inside Huw Evans’ Auckland home. Metre-tall philodendrons and a white-streaked Monstera deliciosa grow upwards in a humid bedroom, their botanical relatives spilling into the lounge and even creeping up the palms outside.
Trendy as his home is, Huw doesn’t embrace all horticultural must-haves. “I have absolutely no time whatsoever for succulents, and I just don’t get cactuses. I know, it’s a very polarizing opinion,” says the rental property manager.
Huw’s collection of tropical flora began two years ago after he landed a bundle of houseplants on a Trade Me auction. The 12 houseplants included a fiddle-leaf fig ‘Bambino’, the large-leafed evergreen he blames for his growing collection. “That’s how it all started,” he says. “I suppose I had a thing for fiddle-leaf figs.”
His indoor garden expanded as he searched YouTube for new varieties and monitored Trade Me for plants on his wish-list. In late 2018, he got into a bidding war over a variegated Monstera deliciosa that cost more than $1000 and had only two glorious leaves. It is his most expensive plant purchase to date.
But just as plants outgrow their pots, Huw soon outgrew his penchant for buying plants from behind a computer screen. “I wanted to connect with the older collecting community, which is where a lot of the plants we now consider rare or desirable originated. These tropicals have surged in popularity in the past 12 months, but nobody gave a fig about them two years ago,” he says.
In 2019, Huw started an Instagram page called A Guy’s Urban Eden to chronicle his collection and meet like-minded collectors. He slowly connected with botanical institutions, gardeners, houseplant enthusiasts and eventually, the older generation of plant collectors.
“This hobby is all about learning from others, building relationships and having this free flow of plants. These people collect for the pure joy of it, to be able to grow plants and not think of them in terms of monetary value.”