Sowing the seeds of love
Urban life is taking its toll, so we’re increasingly turning to gardening for some green relief. But if you find it hard to keep a succulent alive, Alice Vincent has the answers…
if you’re craving to care for a houseplant, or nurturing a nascent ambition to grow your own, you’re not alone. Gardening, long considered the least sexy hobby after Morris dancing, is experiencing a comeback. I know, because I’ve been living a semi-secret life as a gardener for the past five years. At the beginning, people at parties used to snigger when they found out. These days, all they want is advice on how to keep their ferns alive – and I am only too delighted to indulge them.
Botanical trends have been sweeping the catwalk for several seasons now, but our lust for lush foliage has extended into our homes and diets, eventually winding up in our gardens. The recent warm weather has seen garden centres reporting a 20% growth in sales – with Millennials’ love of houseplants boosting sales by 50%.
People have been clamouring to bring nature into their homes for a while now. Between 2016 and 2017, internet sales of flowers rose by 41%, while start-ups such as Patch are reinventing the mail-order seed catalogue, making house plants easy to buy online. Meanwhile, we’re swapping nights at the pub for the opportunity to get dirt beneath our fingernails at workshops that teach terrarium building, bouquet-making and learning the basics of keeping our new green friends alive.
There are several theories about why we’ve become the generation to bring back gardening (a recent survey found that Millennials constitute 29% of all gardening households). One notion is that we’re in the midst of a predictable cycle: the Victorians were obsessed with house plants, and they underwent a resurgence in the ’70s, too. Fifty years on, bringing greenery indoors feels like the perfect addition to mid-century furniture and the clean, Scandinavian
aesthetic that’s lingering persistently in interiors trends.
Social media has helped by bringing together plant nerds in a community where trends are forged and plant problems are solved. I’ve documented most of my gardening journey on Instagram as @noughticulture, and I can confirm that Vanity Fair was right when it said we created the ‘zen corner of the internet’ – plant people are truly the nicest ones in the world.
But while I’ve witnessed gardening trends changing (succulents were usurped by fiddle leaf figs, which have now been replaced by the Audrey ficus), I’m not convinced our love of greenery is going anywhere. And it’s because it feels so good. The health benefits of having plants around have been long-proven: they purify our air, improve concentration and relieve stress. The main reason I got hooked was because I found gardening the most meditative, relaxing activity available.
Furthermore, as we become increasingly invested in where our food comes from and keen to live sustainably, it only makes more sense that we should turn to the earth. After all, basil grown on your windowsill means fewer food miles, less packaging, better taste and more money for your cactus fund. Alice Vincent is the author of ‘ How To Grow Stuff: Easy, No-stress Gardening For Beginners’ (£12.99, Ebury)