House proud

Sarah makes the most of the light coming through the doors to her garden to accommodate many of her houseplants in an ever-changing display. She has added grow lights and fans to an Ikea cabinet to convert it into what is essentially a giant terrarium. The higher humidity inside means she can grow plants that would not thrive elsewhere in the room, such as Biophytum sensitivum. The large Yucca elephantipes on the left, rescued from poor conditions at a local yoga hall, is held up with a strip of fabric – Sarah likes its bent shape and the story that tells.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time outdoors, and nature was a big part of my childhood. Like many gardeners, I can trace my love of plants back to the time I spent with my grandad in his garden. It wasn’t until I was a student without access to a garden that I developed an interest in houseplants. Since then, I’ve never been without a few, but now, it’s a few hundred.

It started in 2017, when I was at a local DIY store and noticed staff members binning orchids that had finished flowering. The sight of healthy plants, midway through their life cycle, being thrown away like broken toys saddened me so deeply that I decided I needed to rescue as many plants as possible. The plants being discarded like that made me reflect on our throwaway society, and how we’re encouraged to replace rather than repair. We’ve moved away from the make-do-and-mend mentality of previous generations and now tend to chuck away everything from faulty appliances and out-of-style clothing to vegetables and plants deemed imperfect. Also, increasingly, houseplants are viewed as short-lived, disposable items, much like a wilted bunch of flowers – but with some TLC, they can live for decades.

Plant production is a multi-billion-pound industry, and with it comes all the environmental costs associated with mass production: energy and water consumption, peat consumption and chemical use, emissions from air and freight travel, not to mention the amount of non-biodegradable plastic used. Those of us who buy houseplants like to think of our hobby as being ‘green’, but plant production actually has a large environmental footprint.

It’s troubling to discover the harm that growing plants on this massive scale has on the environment. When I did, and I realised the fossil-fuel consumption needed