The Houseplant Boom from The Economist.

String of Peas for The Sill

          It’s always interesting to see what outsiders of the plant industry say about us.

I’m copying from The Economist, an international magazine.  The story was pointed out by Chris Beytes, Editor of Grower Talks, the leading horticulture trade magazine.

I’m impressed that we grow 6 of the 8 plants searched for on Google.  Also, I sell to one half of the U.S. businesses mentioned.

--- The closest I’ll come to international notoriety.

People born after 1980 have been slower than previous generations to settle down. Some want to explore the world before they get married and have kids. Others simply cannot afford to buy a house. But they can afford houseplants, and many are finding that nurturing them is a more manageable form of domesticity.

Since the turn of the century, exports of plants from the Netherlands—by far the world’s biggest producer of plant life—have increased from $6bn in 2000 to $9bn in 2016. In that year, Europeans spent some €36bn ($42bn) on houseplants and flowers. And in America, Millennials are thought to account for fully one-third of the houseplant sales. Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer, began selling plants last year, and direct-to-consumer start-ups like Patch and The Sill have cropped up, delivering leafy goods in pretty pots to doorsteps everywhere.

To illustrate the piece, they pulled Google search data for eight different plants, showing the increase in search queries between 2010 and 2018.