Environmental cost of your house plant habit.

Harriet’s Plants is committed to being a sustainable and transparent business. We believe that it is possible for UK consumers to enjoy all the benefits of house plants (and there are plenty) without the hefty environmental cost weighing heavily on your conscience.

At our glasshouse in Staffordshire we do this in several ways, firstly we are proud to be peat free. (You can read more about Peat here) Secondly, we reduce, reuse and recycle throughout the business from water, to single use plastic. Another big contributor to the environmental cost of keeping house plants is the air miles/road miles used to transport them from where they are grown, to houseplant shops and then to you, the proud new plant parent.

All plants sold at Harriet’s plants have been grown by me from seed or from in house propagated stock This dramatically reduces the carbon footprint of your purchase. This doesn’t mean Harriet’s Plants is perfect though as these seeds aren’t available from the UK, so we do have to import small boxes of seeds that packed to the rafters of houseplant goodness. While we are keen to grow more and more varieties we are confident we will continue to propagate from the plants we have to keep our carbon footprint as small as possible. We are also in the process of looking into ways to offset the small footprint we do have- all ideas welcome! Bog regeneration programmes are at the fore front of our minds to try and restore some goodness back in to the environment we treasure so dearly.

In the past year, the RHS has reported a 50 per cent rise in houseplant sales, with an 80 per cent increase in fern sales and 150 per cent rise in sales of the Monstera. If you’ve ever bought a plant from a supermarket, garden centre or florist, chances are it came from Holland, where a billion houseplants were grown in 2018. According to Royal Flora Holland, a floral conglomerate and one of the world’s biggest flower auction companies, 65 per cent of UK indoor plant imports come from the Netherlands. Most popular UK houseplants are from plants native to the tropics. Whilst it would seem more environmentally friendly to ship plants from greenhouses in the Netherlands rather than from greenhouses in Indonesia, there’s not just the air miles to consider. Indonesia has all the humidity and warmth house plants could possibly need, all year round. The Netherlands? Not so much. Nurseries in the Netherlands rely on humidifiers and heaters all year round that create a significant carbon footprint. Harriet’s Plants greenhouse in Staffordshire UK of course also requires a heater for part of the year, but we will be releasing a new blog post in the coming weeks to explain our heating system.

Despite closures brought on by Covid 19, sales of houseplants at garden centres across the UK bloomed in July (2020) according to the Barometer of Trade report. Compared with the same month in 2019, sales were up 81.82%. The guardian attributes booming indoor plants sales as a result of urbanisation, interior design trends and millennials’ desire to have something to nurture and care for.

I think now more than ever we need to consider the environmental impact of our decisions, from food we eat, clothes we wear and to the plants we tend to. While a surging popularity in house plants and horticulture is, on the surface, wonderful news, if all these plants are grown in peat, by an underpaid workforce and shipped half way across the planet, then it is a sustainability disaster waiting to happen.

According to DEFRA, the official Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs, ornamental plants and flowers were worth £1.4 billion in 2020. Interestingly this is a decrease of 1% which can mainly be attributed to the impact of the Pandemic. The ornamental industry of which house plants are a part of, had a difficult start to the year facing a particularly difficult time at the start of the first lockdown with coronavirus related restrictions causing garden centres to close during the critical selling period of the marketing year. While these statistics are not specifically just for Indoor plants, it does recognise how UK plant sellers changed their selling strategies where possible to include online sales, home deliveries and click and collect orders, many using these methods for the first time. Without this pivoting we would have seen much greater losses to our industry. Some lost sales were recovered later in the year when demand increased, and growers produced faster growing plants to replenish the earlier losses. It will be interesting to see how this monumental shift in growing and access to market alongside a growing interest in gardening with the general public will affect the statistics in next years report.

Interestingly Floridata figures show an 11% drop in Dutch plant and flower exports to the UK in June 2017 - a year on from the Brexit vote. Perhaps we will see a further shift towards UK grown alternatives as importing from the EU becomes more problematic. The reality is we are all emerging from a very turbulent and uncertain time and it is hard to predict the future of anything at the moment. One thing is for certain, plants are good for our wellbeing and if we can have more plants in our lives whilst also reducing the environmental cost we will all be that little bit happier.

Plants make people happy.

Harriets Plants is on a mission to change the world one plant at a time. Are you with me?