Last year, we addressed
the trend of indoor horticulture (and not the kind aided by grow lights in a dorm room closet). Since then, houseplants have become ubiquitous on lifestyle blogs alongside such staples as Etsy sellers and recipe trials. Hence, the stylizing of something once seen as a dusty leftover of the ’70s is now yielding a new crop of
media and products for modern green thumbs.
GrowingStyle: If
Domino was still around, it would likely contain a regular feature on decorating with plants now. Picking up the slack is
GrowingStyle,
a new digital magazine devoted to houseplants that’s published by
Costa Farms, the largest producer of indoor plants in the world. Content in the first issue includes a guide to purifying indoor air with houseplants (
tip: red aglaonema), instructions on building a vertical garden, and a behind-the-scenes look at nursery operations complemented by a ‘Grower Knows’ video diary. While the pages brim with aspirational images, the best part may be that, unlike most gardening pubs, it actually acknowledges the struggle faced in keeping indoor plants alive.
The Plant Journal: Utilizing stylists for fashion and food photo editorials is commonplace, but this gorgeous new Spanish publication suggests the emergence of the botanical stylist. The first issue, which debuted this summer, has been
compared with
Apartamento, the gloriously intimate interior design rag that feels like a cozier version of
The Selby. Alongside exquisite photos of plants is a monograph of the
staghorn fern, an expertly art directed story on simple recipes using homegrown herbs, and odes to plant life from assorted writers, designers, illustrators and visual artists. For those without the patience for toiling in soil, framed tear-outs from
The Plant Journal may be the best substitute for a jungle-themed living room.
Urbio: Last summer,
Wooly Pockets domesticized the vertical garden with its introduction of wall-mounted felt sacks intended for the cultivation of plants at home. Urbio is a similar new company that’s developed a magnetic vertical gardening system for space deficient urbanites—no balcony required. The line (
a product of Kickstarter, naturally) consists of a series of wall plates and modular molded eco-plastic containers in varying sizes that, when arranged in clever configurations, appear as if they might have originated during the Space Age design era. In addition to allowing plants to act as art, the system also has another major selling point over traditional pots: a pet can’t knock it over.
