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Grow your likes: the unstoppable rise of the Insta plant

Grow your likes: the unstoppable rise of the Insta plant. They’re green, photogenic and social media stars

Instagram may well have changed the way you garden, even if you don’t have an account. From the plants you buy – and where you buy them – to the gardens you visit, the platform has driven a profound change in the tastes and habits of even established gardeners, not to mention encouraging a new generation of green fingers.

Plants have been inspiring artists for hundreds of years, so they are well suited to the photo app. A younger generation (urban, cash-strapped, Insta-obsessed and renting) are driving houseplant sales, sharing pictures of their plant babies instead of the human ones they can’t afford. From the dramatic structure of mother-in-law’s tongue to blousy tea roses, you can say a lot about your taste through the species you share. Connecting with nature reduces stress, much needed in these chaotic times; even bursts of online greenery, amid Instagram’s sometimes frantic commercialism, are a tonic.

Certain plants look better on Instagram than others: anything with unusual leaf shapes and textures, such as the Chinese money plant, (Pilea peperomioides), trailing hearts (Ceropegia woodii), and the swiss cheese plant (Monstera deliciosa); anything especially oversized, variegated or brightly coloured, such as the hot-pink patterned leaves of philodendron ‘Pink Princess’; and anything that would fill a maximalist display, such as spider plants and string-of-pearls (see @thesill, @cultivatedbychristin, @graceandthorn, @littleandlush for inspiration).

Online stardom has meant a growth in the popularity of appealing varieties, including plants that haven’t been in demand since the 1970s. Traditional nurseries are finding it hard to keep up with demand.

“Many plants that are popular on social media are slow to produce – you can’t just sow a few seeds and expect babies in a few months,” says Jane Perrone, Guardian columnist and creator of the houseplant gardening podcast, On The Ledge. “Things like the variegated monstera can only be vegetatively propagated [by taking a cutting from a parent plant], but until about six years ago no one really wanted them, so the stock of plants is relatively small.” Younger people often expect to buy things at the click of a button. “We would once have seen a plant in a catalogue or a magazine, and had to phone a nursery or visit a garden centre – now we expect to find it immediately online,” she says. “It’s taking the industry a while to catch up.”

This means Instagram-friendly plants are big business. Take the aforementioned philodendron ‘Pink Princess’. “These are so difficult to get hold of and grow so slowly that the prices are hugely inflated; tiny cuttings go for £120 or more,” says Claire Ransom, founder of the online nursery, Lazy Flora. “This creates an almost mythical status on Instagram.”

A trawl through Etsy, the online marketplace, confirms these eye-watering price tags: two small string of hearts plants for £69.99; heart-shaped hoyas for £52; and a variegated monstera for more than £300. They can, however, be bought for much less.

When Ransom moved into a flat with outdoor space, she realised how hard it was to find the right plants. “I didn’t have a car, so getting to and from a big garden centre was a challenge,” she says. “If I managed to get a lift, the selection of plants was often poor. At smaller boutiques closer to home, plants were expensive.”

So in 2017 Ransom set up Lazy Flora, one of a new breed of online plant subscription services that feed the growing appetite for houseplants. “Instagram is vital to our business,” she says. “It’s a great way to connect with people directly, and to learn about trends. One of the advantages of a subscription is that we know numbers ahead of time, so we can order the exact number of plants each month.”

Ransom selects varieties based on how photogenic they are. “Leaves with patterns or interesting shapes, such as those on fittonia or burro’s tail (Sedum morganianum), or the rainbow-like colours of succulents always do well,” she says. “If our customers can take good pictures and share them on social media, that’s great for us. We sell more plants when customers can focus on closeups of the leaves or flowers, such as red calathea or a flower-laden Christmas cactus.”

If Instagram favours the photogenic, it’s a brutal time for less attractive varieties. “Palms are an elegant and sturdy choice for low-light homes, but because of their lack of social media wow (they are hard to photograph because the leaves can appear messy, and aren’t particularly impactful) they have become less popular over the last 18 months,” says Paul Holt, creative director at N1 Garden Centres in London.

Like fashion and interiors, plants are now at the whim of changing trends. While tropical banana leaves and pineapples used to figure large on Instagram, they hit critical mass on the high street and have been replaced by monstera and succulents. Also, large plants are hard to fit into a small rented flat, and easy to kill if not cared for in a chilly garden – many Instagram plant fans are, after all, still new to gardening and learning as they grow.

Public collections also benefit from Instagram’s clout. Take Kew Gardens, for example: visitors under 26 to the Royal Botanic Gardens have increased by 145% over the past five years, with 13% saying their visit was encouraged by social media. How they behave when there is changing, too. “People are still taking selfies, but we’re increasingly seeing more images posted of plants than people,” says Kew’s head of digital experience, Chloe Hayward-Grant. “They often choose to post intricate closeups: the fronds of a fern, say, or the petals of an alpine flower.” The newly refurbished Temperate House is an Instagram hit, its dramatic windows the perfect backdrop. “If you visit on a sunny day, with the light streaming through 15,000 panes of glass, it’s an incredibly photogenic space,” says Hayward-Grant. Kew’s Instagram account (@kewgardens) – a stream of curated petals and sprawling green landscapes – has more than doubled its followers in the last 18 months. The hashtag #kewgardens, featuring mostly glasshouse interiors and waterlily-strewn ponds, has more than half a million tags.

Flower shows have also learned how to attract younger visitors and generate social media hype: they have introduced houseplant displays, dramatic backdrops such as flower walls and mass planting schemes, and invited influencers such as Estée Lalonde (more than 700k Instagram followers) and Joe Sugg (5.5m followers) to document events. “The RHS Instagram account grew by 20,000 followers over the first three days of RHS Chelsea this year,” says Rose Gore Browne, Chelsea flower show’s manager. The most popular posts under the hashtag #RHSChelsea were big, bright flowers – peonies, alliums and roses.

Gardening has never been trendier, and the industry is having to apply green fingers to Instagram’s pulse and respond in record time. “It’s certainly strange for me,” says Lazy Flora’s Ransom, “because no one was interested in plants for a while and I’m suddenly doing a job that’s in fashion.”