When the pandemic padlocked international borders earlier this year, MaSovaida Morgan traded her itinerant life as a travel writer for a steady gig working remotely in Washington, DC for a tech company based in Silicon Valley. It was the first time in years that the 36-year-old had settled in one place for more than a few weeks, so she turned to houseplants to give her apartment a sense of serenity she often found on her adventures abroad.

“I really didn’t see it as frivolous,” she explains of her 25 newly-purchased plants. “If I’m going to be spending my entire existence in a 450-square-foot studio apartment, then it’s got to be a sanctuary for me where I can be productive, take a break and find peace.”

Fuelled by a boom in so-called ‘plantfluencers’ on Instagram, houseplant sales were skyrocketing among US millennials even before the pandemic, with a nearly 50% rise in sales between 2017 and 2019, according to the National Gardening Association. Now, many like Morgan see them as a necessary tool in fostering optimal work-from-home conditions… (continue reading at the BBC).