Felipe Gallegos used to work in the fashion industry, designing store displays for Abercrombie & Fitch and Uniqlo, but now he spends his days helping plants thrive in his New York City office building.
On a recent morning, Gallegos and eight fellow plant caretakers from Greenery NYC, which designs and maintains plant installations for a variety of businesses, were gathered outside Etsy's Brooklyn headquarters. As they prepared to make their way toward the 20,000 plants that grow inside the nine-story building, they could be mistaken for an artist collective or a large alternative band.
The Greenery's staff are part of a new breed of plant folk: they worked in theatre, media, fashion and the arts before deciding they'd be happier making a living tending to Monsteras and birds of paradise.
The Greenery's 21 plant caretakers, or horticulturists, typically make their rounds during work hours. Dressed casually, they move silently from plant to plant; office workers might not notice them if they didn't have watering cans strapped to their backpacks. They frequently stop to type detailed notes into their phones about any changes in the health of the plants they care for.
Most offices require a team of three to four workers who spend hours watering, pruning, and sometimes moving the plants to ensure they get the right light and shade. Etsy's 200,000-square-foot workspace is a real challenge, with workers sometimes there for up to eight hours.
At Etsy, Mr. Gallegos, 38, was tending to climbing pothos and birds of paradise plants while his colleagues were spread across the building. Afterwards, he took a step back to inspect his work.
“That's something I learned from my background in visual merchandising,” he says. “Does it look great from every angle?”
Rebecca Breene, founder of Greenery NYC, said her company has been inundated with applicants recently. “They say, 'I see a lot of plant stores, and I want to change my lifestyle,'” she said. That's a big change from 10 years ago, when it was hard to find workers and most came from the landscaping industry, she added.
For the workers at Greenery NYC, whose clients include Bank of America, Google, Cartier, Netflix and The New York Times, there's also the aesthetic challenge of choosing the right plants and flowers for a particular space.
Erin Eck, director of continuing education at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, said she's noticed an uptick in interest in the garden's horticulture certificate program. Until recently, she said, classes were attended mostly by retirees. Now there's a waiting list, and students “are looking to make this a career,” Eck said.
After earning her master's degree in history from Sarah Lawrence College, Lauren Clark spent 12 years working as a freelance historical researcher for documentary films. She was dissatisfied with her job, but found deep satisfaction when she transformed a concrete pit behind her Brooklyn apartment into a garden. So she took a job with the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance and is now one of two gardeners who care for McGorrick Park in Greenpoint.
“When I'm walking down the street covered in mud with clippers on my belt, I realize I don't look like a Sarah Lawrence graduate,” Clark says.
Going from documentary work to weeding may seem like a big jump, but plant care is now seen as a profession akin to design or art, as evidenced by the fact that writers for the Netflix show “Beef,” starring Ali Wong, created her character as the owner of Koyo House, a high-end plant shop.
The hipness of the plant business coincided with related movements in fashion, cooking, and design that occurred around the turn of the century: High-end fashion designers took inspiration from Carhartt and other workwear brands that had long made clothes for workers; chefs assembled menus of seasonal, simple food in farm-to-table restaurants with cracked wooden tables; interior designers moved away from rococo to sophisticated versions of grandmothers' houses in the woods.
Plants were natural candidates to be reinvented by the craze for rustic chic: Macramé hangers and Bzippy planters started appearing on Pinterest mood boards, while tiny potted succulents adorned office desks and apartment windows. The emergence of biophilic design, which introduces natural elements into the home and office to promote a sense of well-being, made lush plant displays a staple for Silicon Valley startups and established companies alike.
Taylor Johnston, who runs the Rhode Island nursery Issima and the women's workwear brand Gamine, can remember a time before plants became a necessity and when those who cared for them received little respect.
Despite having a degree in horticultural design, Johnston says she had few opportunities and status when she started out, working on a flower farm and making a living designing residential landscapes. “People literally called me 'the maid,'” she said, recalling an encounter with an overbearing homeowner.
In 2008, fashion retailer Anthropologie launched its garden-and-home brand, Terrain, when Hilton Carter, then a budding filmmaker, visited the flagship store and cafe in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, and was “blown away” by the beauty of the tropical plants hanging like chandeliers, Carter says.
He went on to become a plant influencer on Instagram and write several books about plant-based home design, and says he's noticed a change in the status of houseplants since he got into the field: “There wasn't really a lot of, 'Let's treat plants as art,' but now you see that.”
In 2012, The Sill, a store with the motto “plants make people happy,” opened in New York. Founder Eliza Blank wanted to create a plant-based atmosphere, not just sell chic potted plants to nature-starved city dwellers. “We felt like this was an often-overlooked category that had all the makings of a beautiful brand,” Blank said. Soon her company was lavishly displaying thousands of plants in offices across the city.
Other upscale boutiques have popped up, including Cactus Store, Folia Collective, Homecoming, Sprout Home, Tula House, and Greenery NYC's retail store, Greenery Unlimited. Many of them double as cafes, and sell artist-made ceramics and the latest issues of Apartamento magazine. The salespeople are dressed like modern plant-tenders in Ilana Kohn-esque jumpsuits and cotton work aprons, paired with Birkenstocks and worn sneakers.
Nick Katumpas adopted the name Farmer Nick after he left a six-figure sales job at a Manhattan tech startup to become a full-time gardener. “It was really refreshing to get out of the corporate laptop world,” he says. He now serves clients in New York and Los Angeles in his business, “The Plant Coach,” a term he coined himself.
“I wanted to dig holes and carry dirt up four stories of stairs,” Katumpas said. “I loved it.”
Greenery NYC's Bullene spent nearly a decade in book publishing before working as an in-house editor at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where she studied horticultural design and began consulting for residential and commercial clients.
Many of The Greenery's 38 employees, including 21 horticulturists who work out of an office building in the city, have backgrounds in media, fashion and related fields, Breene said.
“Most of our staff are interested in music and the arts,” she says, “and we have a culture of embracing plants as part of the design.”
On a recent morning at the company's workspace in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, dozens of muscular ferns, destined for the Google building in Manhattan, were lined up on the sidewalk. Nearby, Harry Goldberg was tending to office staples, including a Monstera plant with leaves as holey as Swiss cheese.
Ms. Goldberg, 28, a theater major who has worked as a stagehand and retailer since college, was wearing Levi's bib overalls (with front pockets perfect for storing pruning tools) and was wiping rust fungus off leaves with a rag soaked in two parts water and one part alcohol.
“I never thought this could be a job before I got here,” Goldberg said, adding that she loves her job, saying it “completely activates this part of my brain that was activated when I was doing theater.”
Another employee, Elan Nguyen, 23, a Fashion Institute of Technology graduate, repotted tropical plants as Fleetwood Mac's “Rhiannon” blared in the open workroom. Her black tank top revealed tattoos of Chinese fan palms and delicately painted ferns on her arms. She lifted a bag full of clay pebbles and poured some into a ceramic pot. She then removed a plant from its plastic pot and forcefully moved it into a ceramic planter.
“Instead of just sitting at a desk and lazing around, I'm constantly moving,” said Nguyen, who worked briefly for a clothing brand before taking up plant care. “It's like exercise.”
Since plant care became a trendy profession, Brunet says she has had to change her recruiting strategy: Instead of convincing potential candidates that plant care is a great job, she tries to scare them away by emphasizing that the job requires serious physical work.
She tells potential employees that it might take them an hour to unload 650 plants from a truck in a rainstorm, or that they might have to carry a 60-pound bag of soil up 10 flights of stairs in an office building because the freight elevator is broken.
“There's a lot of optimism about working with plants,” Breen says. “People come to us thinking it's an easy job,” she laughs. “I don't know of any easy jobs in New York.”