Here's the Real Reason You Kill Plants from the Store

How I Accidentally Kill Plants

I've emptied my wallet more than a couple of times at the plant store. Let me tell you a tale of two fiddle-leaf figs...

I'm browsing a big franchise plant store one day when I come across these gorgeous, huge fiddle-leaf figs. I suddenly want nothing more in the world than to have one. So I buy the one with the most beautiful leaves. I'm still pretty new to gardening and am definitely not a houseplant expert—but I want to be.

The fiddle-leaf fig barely fits into my minivan. On the drive home, I'm thinking, "This is a tropical plant. The store had it under shade, but I think it needs a healthy dose of sun before I bring it inside." I plop it on our south-facing back patio and take the kids to the pool. By the time I come back, every single leaf on that plant is scorched. Too late, I realize the last thing this plant needed is direct Houston sun in the middle of summer.

I bring the plant inside and baby it over the next couple of months. It revives a little, but it never looks the same as it did for those five glorious minutes when I first brought it home.

I buy my second fiddle-leaf fig years later, right in the middle of our first winter in Chicago. We're in the middle of a Polar Vortex, and I decide I need to try my hand at indoor gardening again because nothing is growing outside. I leave my husband with the kids and head to Home Depot to do a little plant therapy shopping.

Lo and behold, they have fiddle-leaf figs, and these plants are calling my name.

I buy a plant, a nice pot, and some potting soil. I know what I'm doing now. I know this plant needs bright indirect light and to stay nice and cozy indoors. I push the plant in a cart to my car, drive the 15 minutes home with the heat blasting, park the car in the garage, bring the plant inside, and pot it up. Within 24 hours, all the leaves have dropped or turned a blackish purple. Turns out, tropical plants aren't meant to be exposed to zero-degree weather, even for a couple minutes.

Once again, I've managed to kill my investment in less than 24 hours. I might as well have thrown my money in the garbage can.

Those plant stores did their job. They brought really nice-looking plants in from wherever they were grown. They slapped a price tag on them, watered them, and kept them safe in their sheltered little environment. They successfully got the product from the grower/the supplier to the customer (me). One even put a little tag on there to tell me the light preferences for my new houseplant.

So, what's the problem?

(Prefer to listen? Check out episode 29 of the Grow Your Self podcast, "The Problem with the Plant Store", on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or Stitcher.)

Have You Been Wondering: Why Do Plants Die When I Bring Them Home?

The problem is not you. It's the plant store. Let me tell you one more story to illustrate how.

My first spring in Chicago, I researched local nurseries nearby. I wanted to buy lots of herbs, but I was scarred from my experience with the figs from the big box stores. I picked a nursery and stopped by. The employee pointed me to some of the most lush, vibrant-looking herbs I'd ever seen. I mean, these plants were amazing to behold.

I started filling up my cart gleefully. At the checkout, I asked the employee, "What do you do to these herb plants to make them so wonderful?"

She pointed. "Do you see those little hoses at the top of our greenhouse ceiling?” 

I looked up to see lines and lines of hoses.

"Those are filled with Miracle-Gro."

Ah. From the minute these seedlings sprout, they're pumped with Miracle-Gro every single day. That is why they look so amazing.

I brought those herbs home but can't say I ever ate from them. Why not? Because they were grown on synthetic fertilizers that create toxic gases detrimental to human health.

Lesson learned: Always ask how your plants have been grown before you put them in your cart.

Many of the plants that look so great at the store have been treated with fungicide and synthetic fertilizers so they look enticing to customers. When you bring those plants home, if you don't continue to feed them the exact chemical cocktail they're used to, the plants will either hang out and not grow much or give up being green entirely.

Plants sold at big box stores have also typically traveled long distances to reach a store near you. In my experience, the more local the nursery, the better, though that didn't work out for me very well with the Chicago nursery.

So, we've got plants fed a bunch of synthetic stuff, plants that are stressed out from travel, and employees that can point you to the product but not necessarily tell you if that's the right product for you and your situation. Taken together, this is the reason so many people think they don't have green thumbs. They buy products, get home, watch the plant die or the product not work, and end up thinking it's their fault.

The Problem with the Plant Store

Plant stores are great at getting the product to customers, but they ultimately don't care if those customers know how to keep them alive, let alone care for them in a way that helps them thrive.

From my own experience killing my houseplants and from my market research for my garden consulting company, I've come to realize there's a serious issue with the plant store and the garden industry in general.

The garden industry is booming. In 2020, people spent $51 billion on gardening products in the US alone. The average household spends about $500 a year on gardening products.

What is that money being spent on?

That money is going to a broad range of nursery and garden products, including trees, shrubs, plants, seeds, bulbs, sod, farming supplies, animal feed, etc. The majority of it, however, is spent on plants and plant products like fertilizers and mulch. The largest two categories are annual plants and houseplants.

The issue here is all this money is being spent, but it's being spent, in general, the way I spent my money on my two fiddle-leaf figs. We drop $50 or $100 on a plant with this desire to surround ourselves with beautiful, thriving greenery, to return ourselves to nature. That's what we expect to get when we spend our money on plants.

But what we typically end up with instead is a dead plant because we bring these plants home and have no idea what to do with them—or we think we know what to do with them, and we're wrong. Even if we're not wrong, it's sometimes really hard to get it right thanks to the bad growing practices the plants have already been exposed to.

This is what I call "the problem with the plant store", but it's really the problem with the entire garden industry, which is currently upside down. It's focused on product, not on people.

The second time I bought a tropical houseplant, two clerks were involved in checking me out. Neither of them said, "Hey, be really careful with this plant. Actually, we should cover this plant before you bring it outside because it's 0 degrees."

They didn't say that because they didn't know that.  

The focus of stores like that is not education for its employees or its customers. It's just product sales.

The First Time I Experienced the Way Plant Buying Should Be

There's a company I really respect called Urban Harvest in Houston, and they do a fruit tree sale every year in February. It's incredible. They partner with some of the great fruit tree growers in the city and then place volunteers in every spot where a new tree variety is available. By every fruit tree and bush you can buy, there's a sign that describes how the plant grows, what kind of production you should get, how to care for it, when to plant it, how to plant it, etc. If you still have questions, the person standing by can help you. I found them an invaluable resource on things I should consider before buying certain varieties.

I'd seen fruit trees for sale all over the city, but I had never shopped for a plant like this before. My first time walking through, I thought, "Wow, this is the way plants should be purchased."

This company didn't just rely on their plants being pretty to attract customers. They set you up for success through first making sure it's the right plant for you and then educating you on how to care for the plant you're buying.

My dream is for the entire garden industry to become more like this. In fact, one of the reasons I founded Gardenary was to bridge this gap between products and plant education.

The Gardenary Vision for How to Have Plants Without Killing Plants

When I started Rooted Garden in Houston, my main focus was designing and installing beautiful kitchen garden spaces. It didn't take long for the questions to start rolling in from my clients:

• What do I do now?
• What happened to this plant? Why are its leaves wilting?
• What kind of pest is this?
• How do I harvest this?
• Are these plants too crowded?
• Should I prune this?

I realized that even though we'd given them a great setup, there was still that necessary element of education. Without it, success is just not possible.

It was then that I decided to start Gardenary, an online platform 100 percent committed to garden education (not so much houseplants yet, but maybe one day!). Gardenary is intended to be a sister company to kitchen garden design and installation companies like Rooted Garden and all the others out there, a way to focus on the people growing these plants instead of just the products.

My vision for Gardenary is to help make gardening ordinary. So ordinary that the average person is familiar with the general theories of gardening and has the skills to care for the plants they purchase.

Gardening Education Should Be Location-Specific

As I grew Gardenary, I started getting tons of questions from people all over the country. I quickly realized that questions for the garden aren't just plant specific, they're also location specific.

Think back to the fruit tree sale I went to in Houston. The answers to the questions I was asking about plant care would be quite different if that sale were up in Chicago. There would need to be a different set of volunteers who knew about growing fruit trees in a colder climate. Things that grow certain ways in Houston are going to grow a totally different way, if at all, in Chicago, and vice versa. 

When it comes to vegetable gardening, local knowledge is vital. In other words, I realized I could not answer everyone's questions, and that I shouldn't. If someone's trying to decide whether to buy a product for their garden or when to grow a certain plant, the best person to answer them is someone who's growing in their climate.

I wish I'd had a local garden coach when I first moved to Chicago. I was trying to rush to set up my garden and fill it with life before the photoshoot for my first book, Kitchen Garden Revival, but I didn't really know all that much about growing during such a cold spring.

I also really liked the idea of decentralizing the control over the garden industry that these big plant stores have. It just doesn't make sense for people from all over the country—from Chicago to Nashville to Houston to LA—to go to a big box store and be able to buy the exact same plant to grow outdoors, even though they're all in very different climates. These generic plant stores that don't teach us how to grow, especially not on a local level, are not serving us.

I kept asking, "Can we change this?"

The industry needs to be flipped on its head. Garden education and plant types should be specific to local pockets. If you're in Chicago and want to set up a vegetable garden, you should have a person who knows how to set up a garden and what to plant there when as your main source of information to help you make wise purchases.

Now Let's Change the Garden Industry

Let's change the problem with the plant store together. I'm not saying to stop spending your money at the plant store. Lord knows, I love spending a dollar, two dollars, a whole bunch of dollars at the plant store. All I'm saying is to get educated first. Pay people who can help you know what to do with those plants when you buy them.

We hire coaches for all kinds of things these days. My neighbor just sent their pet off for two weeks of pet obedience coaching. If that dog deserves some obedience coaching, you deserve some plant coaching. You'll be putting money back into your local economy by supporting the gardeners who know what they're doing. And not just supporting them as a handout, but paying them to teach you so that you can have the same success they enjoy in your own space. Overall, your investment will save you so much time, money, and frustration.

This is how we'll start to see changes for the better in this industry. That's how we'll build a consumer base of gardeners who walk into a plant store and—instead of getting overwhelmed by products and options—have a strong foundation of knowledge that helps them know what's right for them.

To make it easier to connect people to great gardeners in their area, I created Garden Coach Society. The Society trains gardeners from all over the country in how to start their own garden coach business just as I did with Rooted Garden, so that people who think they have black thumbs and beginner gardeners everywhere can find knowledgeable people to help educate them. You can find gardeners we've trained in your area in our business directory.

Let's Refocus on Education in the Garden

You don't have to consider yourself a killer of plants. It's not your fault. You're just trying to buy a fiddle-leaf fig for your office, to spend your small piece of the $51 billion-pie, but meanwhile, there's so much going on behind the scenes at the plant store and garden industry that don't set you up for success.

You don't have all the information, so you're doomed to fail. You don't know how a plant was bred or what it needs because there's no one there to educate you. You bring it home, and the plant dies or fails to thrive or immediately gets a disease. Sure, not all plants from the store end up that way, but a large percentage of the $51 billion do.

And it's all because the industry is upside down, because it's product-focused and not education-focused. Had I not paused to ask that woman how her nursery's herbs were grown, I never would have known. I would have brought those plants home and thought it was my fault that they were dying because they weren't getting their Miracle-Gro fix.

The point of this is not to turn you off plants. Keep all your excitement about houseplants or vegetable gardening. The point is to encourage you to turn your attention more toward education before you buy. Buying yoga pants doesn't make you a yogi, you know? Buying a plant doesn't mean you're equipped to keep that plant alive. Take some time to read up on the plants you want to buy so you don't waste your money when you have to throw them in the trash.

I know that doing your homework first takes some fun out of retail therapy, but you'll be thankful for your due diligence when you're surrounded by happy, thriving plants.