How to keep your houseplants anything but basic

By Margaret Roach

For The New York Times

In an era when shelves of mass-produced houseplants tempt us at big-box stores and supermarkets alike, Robert Moffitt sets an example for an alternative model to consider.

Moffitt, founder of the Haus Plant, a botanical design studio in Los Angeles, wonders if instead of impulsively purchasing another of those foliage-forward commodity types that too often become what he laments as “a quick little throwaway,” we might widen our definition of houseplant.

What if we scoured sources like Facebook Marketplace and estate sales and leaned into characterful plants with more sculptural forms like he does — plants with presence, and that maybe possess the potential for longtime companionship?

While we’re at it, let’s also rethink the generic flowerpot, he proposes, and experiment with extremes of shape, scale and material to show off its resident most artfully.

The plants Moffitt specializes in are not your basic Pothos or Peperomia, and admittedly may require some visual recalibration on our part, at least until we’re in sync with the beauty of their idiosyncrasies.

“I collected basic houseplants from Home Depot or the grocery store, like many people do,” he said. “And over time I started to just get into the more interesting ones, and the weird ones that you don’t see very often.”

Moffitt, 37, does not have formal design training; he is a former registered nurse, which is reflected in his take on plants. He worked for a decade at UCLA Health, and during his later years there, he said, “I found myself turning to plants as a form of therapy myself.”

They also satisfied another need. “I always had a creative itch,” he said, “and I think plants were there for me as my creative outlet.”

He started working at a friend’s plant shop on his days off, and by 2020, during the pandemic, he knew he wanted to shift careers. He explored possible retail spaces, but they proved too costly, so he started his business in a plant truck that he drove to Los Angeles-area farmers markets in the Palisades, Brentwood and Malibu, attracting a clientele he might not have otherwise, including various celebrities.

Two and a half years ago, Moffitt leased a former auto body shop on W. 3rd Street in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles as headquarters for himself and 13 employees, plus one very charismatic tortoise named Willy, who is the mascot in residence and has his own popular Instagram account. The showroom is open for plant sales by appointment; much of the business is plant-focused design and maintenance in clients’ homes or businesses, including hotels, corporate headquarters and design showrooms.

“I look at plants and the styling that I do and the service we provide as sort of connecting people back to nature in a different way,” he said, “through the lens of design.”

A strategy for dry times

Moffitt’s palette features some “very Dr. Seuss plants,” he said, and the most extreme among them are the caudiciform ones, those with distinctive swollen stem bases, or caudexes. He first fell for them at the Huntington, the cultural institution and botanic garden in San Marino.

These oddballs include the shaving brush tree (Pseudobombax ellipticum), native to parts of the Caribbean, Central America and southern Mexico; the Queensland bottle tree from Australia (Brachychiton rupestris); and the baobab tree (Adansonia digitata) from sub-Saharan Africa.

In each of these plants’ homelands, an annual extended dry season poses a challenge, so the thickened storage organs evolved as survival mechanisms. The plants drop their leaves, shut down and live off water stashed inside for a not-rainy day.

Confined to a pot, with some topgrowth and maybe their roots pruned, even ones that would become small trees in the wild are essentially transformed into bonsais.

They perch defiantly in Moffitt’s preferred shallow bowl- or pan-shaped vessels, which, despite their meager proportions, might not need changing for decades. These are plants from lean, tough places, and they don’t ask much. He offers them a fast-draining, airy potting medium — like one for cactuses and succulents — and bright light. He waters them weekly in summer, but also respects their annual dormant period from late fall to midspring, giving them a drink maybe every four to six weeks.

They age gracefully, becoming more impressive by the decade — just like Willy, the African sulcata tortoise who is now 8 years old and 70 pounds (on his way to maybe a century and a peak weight of 200 pounds). Moffitt adopted Willy from a tortoise rescue ranch, naming him after Willy Guhl, the modernist Swiss designer whose fiber-cement vessels often figure in the Haus Plant’s work.

Any resemblance Willy bears to a venerable specimen of an elephant’s foot plant (Dioscorea elephantipes), a distinctive South African caudiciform, is probably not purely coincidental. Vine bearing heart-shaped leaves do not emanate from Willy’s shell, however; he is more inclined to devour greenery than sprout it.

The living artworks Moffitt incorporates into clients’ spaces may have been chosen to match an aesthetic goal, but looks are not their only contribution. A majority of the new plant parents quickly discover what Moffitt did when he immersed himself in this world: Tending to the plant is not just another chore, but often becomes a welcome ritual, “a form of mindfulness,” he said.

Clients find themselves in a relationship based on active caring that is sustaining to both plant and person.

“We all have our rituals that we live by — our morning or bedtime routines — and plant care and just the act of watering it or doing basic pest control can be such a routine, and be healing,” he said.

Roots as art form

The eccentric botanical personalities enlivening the Haus Plant showroom include a grouping of preposterous, giant, silvery-green globes of Deuterocohnia brevifolia, a terrestrial bromeliad from Argentina and Bolivia, each one 20 to 60 years old. The plant’s habit is at first like a ground cover, but after “decades of dense, compact growth in bright light,” Moffitt said, it “slowly mounds on itself,” no armature or other support required.

He uses pint-size Deuterocohnia in miniature gardens, too, perhaps in a dish with a Queensland bottle tree and a shapely stone as roommates.

On a workbench nearby are various works in progress, the latest subjects to make their way from a sort of triage area in an out-of-the-way corner, where each plant he has adopted waits to start its transformation. Repotting, like heavy pruning, is timed for late spring and early summer.

Each living project is a one-off, requiring a willingness to experiment. Will a particular plant let you train multiple trunks to gradually intertwine, or show off some of their roots above ground? Moffitt recalled his first root-revealing adventure, with a Queensland bottle tree.

“They have a really interesting root structure below the soil,” he said, “but you can also lift that to expose what’s going on” by training the gnarly roots over a rock and using a bit of waterproof silicone adhesive to provide gentle support until the roots establish. Some plants are instead wired to their containers to get started, similar to traditional bonsai techniques.

Rock figs, Ficus petiolaris and Ficus palmeri, both from Mexico, can likewise be coaxed into showing off what’s usually hidden. Once their roots are positioned, Moffitt may wrap them with sphagnum moss; over time they thicken and adhere.

Each effort, and each season together, gradually enhances the picture, and evolves our perception of and relationship to houseplants.

“I feel like plants can be reimagined,” Moffitt said. “They don’t have to sit quietly in a corner anymore: They can define a space, anchor a mood or even tell a story. They can be architectural, sculptural or emotional.”

When Moffitt worked in nursing, he saw “how healing comes from attention — from being present,” he said.

“Plants taught me the same lesson in another language,” he added. “They invite you to slow down, to notice, to tend. That’s their quiet medicine.”

Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A Way to Garden, and a book of the same name.