# Why We Should Care About Houseplants June 27, 2025 By Giulia Carabelli / edited by [Rachael Petersen](/people/rachael-petersen "Rachael Petersen") In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, fortunate to be working from home, I lived for extended periods of time alone with many houseplants. This changed my relationship with them dramatically. I felt intimate with them. I worried deeply for them. I too often obsessed over their leaves, roots, and soil to check on their vitals. I felt a distinct sense of love and care in their presence that continues to this day. To me, they are loyal friends able to transform any unwelcoming space into a home. ![Potted cacti by a window](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-06/Cacti%20in%20lockdown.jpeg?itok=eKxh7cSg) The author's potted cacti photographed during the COVID-19 lockdown (image courtesy of the author)Surely inspired by this blossoming relationship, in spring 2020, I started Care for Plants, [a research project](https://theconversation.com/house-plants-were-our-link-with-nature-in-lockdown-now-they-could-change-how-we-relate-to-the-natural-world-147637) investigating houseplant-care practices. I wanted to know more about the viral phenomenon of “[plant parenthood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoG65AYrsx4)” that prompted lifestyle magazines, including [*Vogue*](https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/plant-parenting), to discover houseplants. In a recent article written with sociologist of time Dawn Lyon titled “[Time with Houseplants: A sociological analysis of temporalities, affective entanglements and practices of care](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380261251335747),” we argue that during lockdown, when time seemed to slow down, human and plant time synchronised better so that new synergies could be found. People could now appreciate slow movements and growth, which usually escape human perception, prompting a change of attitude toward plants. Drawing on the stories I collected about people and their houseplants, I am now writing a book about plant care practices that explores how plant-human households become incubators for meaningful partnerships with plant worlds. In the book, I propose houseplants as secret agents of vegetal worlds. They enter homes, befriend humans, and slowly take over their carers’ lives. My aim is to show that houseplants are far from still and silent objects sitting pretty in our homes. On the contrary, they can make people more and more devoted to their care. In extreme cases, people’s priorities change dramatically to accommodate plant life, their imagination resets, and their understanding of plant worlds broadens. By discussing caring for houseplants as a practice that makes people feel closer to plants and comfortable sharing space/time with them, I want to show the potential of building plant-people worlds that are effectively expansive, creative, and offer alternative ways of living and thinking about nonhumans. In the stories I gathered, the bonds between people and houseplants are so solid that they cannot be explained as a temporary trend or mere hobby. Plant care emerges not as a leisure activity, but rather as a lifestyle that entails consistent (and intensive) labor. In fact, living with many houseplants requires adjustments in space and time that transform the feeling and look of one’s home, at times, drastically. Sarah, for example, used her engineering training to transform the flat where she lives into an ideal ecosystem for her growing family of tropical plants, at the expense of her own comfort, as her vegetal friends require a very humid environment. Martina’s morning schedule has changed to accommodate daily plant checks to ensure the well-being of her 80+ houseplants. ![Shadow of a plant on a wall](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-06/2024%20home.jpeg?itok=yFPsS-mc) Houseplants as domestic companions (image courtesy of the author)For most of the plant carers I met in lockdown, houseplants have remained a daily priority—but for some, the transformation was even deeper. Lucia, for example, no longer purchases plants in shops. This is because she does not want to support plant-commodification and those who profit from it. Lucia’s indoor garden is made exclusively of cuttings exchanged with fellow plant lovers and the occasional plant-snapping at garden centres—an extension (and manifestation) of her anti-capitalist politics. Rescued from the exploitative chain of houseplant production, Lucia’s plants stand strong behind her as she promotes sustainable living practices as part of her environmental activism, which she started during lockdown while communing with her plants. Lucia tells me that her houseplants radicalized her. Before lockdown, she had an office job and cared for houseplants in her spare time. Now, she prioritizes making time for her plants because she considers them family. In fact, many of the plant carers I interviewed experienced their time with houseplants during lockdowns as one of renewal. By becoming more attuned to the slowness of plants, they had time to reflect on the unhealthy relations they had with what they considered more oppressive conceptions of time: conceptions that construed time as a precious resource that must be “used” to enhance productivity. In this sense, plant care instilled mindfulness because it encouraged inhabiting time in a way that supports slowness and care in its more [revolutionary potential](https://thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/march-2020/radical-care/). While writing about houseplant-people communing around the world, I remain aware of the fact that houseplants are plants that live in captivity, [extracted from their natural habitat](https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/blogs/problematic-history-and-ecological-impact-uk-houseplant-industry) (or [mass-produced](https://maxapress.com/article/doi/10.48130/tihort-0025-0005)) to furnish homes that are often not equipped to meet their needs. This fact of modern urban life troubles many houseplant carers while fuelling a very [prosperous market](https://flora-magazine.com/house-plants-for-profit/). But my research shows that this is just part of a far more complex story. Houseplants can successfully bond with their people and reshape their understandings of plant worlds. In short, houseplants are more than home décor. The more attention people give to houseplants, the more they fall for them, and, in exchange, they are drawn into their unique nurturing companionship, which transforms and expands people’s attitudes towards nonhuman life. My project locates the potential of houseplant-care within broader conversations about how to orient toward the future while acknowledging how we have collectively failed to create and maintain a flourishing world. In other words, I argue that the micro-practice of houseplant care can be the starting point to reimagine relationships on this planet, to reassign meaning and value to nonhuman others, and to recharge the imagination toward a different way of being human, with plants, on a shared planet. --- ![Giulia Carabelli Headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/2025-06/Giulia-Carabelli-v1_0.jpg) [Giulia Carabelli](https://www.qmul.ac.uk/politics/staff/profiles/carabelligiulia.html) is Senior Lecturer in Social Theory at Queen Mary, University of London. Her current research project, [Care for Plants](https://www.instagram.com/careforplants/?hl=en), explores how people make a home with houseplants by conceptualizing the possibility of plant intimacy and its potential to shape plant-human collaborations for a more just future. She is the co-director, with Matthew Beach, of [The Plant Forum](https://www.instagram.com/theplantforum/?hl=en-gb), a platform that promotes collaborations between plants and people. See also:- [ Thinking with Plants and Fungi ](/programming-threads/thinking-plants-and-fungi) - [ TWPF Blog Page ](/programming-threads/twpf-blog-page)