Consider the Cactus: How Succulents Took Over Instagram—and Then the World

One early Saturday morning in March, a little over 100 succulent enthusiasts gathered on a sunny hillside in Bonsall, California, for a glimpse of their favorite YouTube star. It was the second day of the Waterwise Botanicals nursery’s annual Super Succulent Celebration, and the 20-acre property was decked out like a drought-resistant Disneyland. There were stands selling macramé and ceramics, food trucks from Beachin’ Boba and Devil Dogs BBQ, and a cluster of make-your-own-succulent-arrangement workshops for both children and adults. But at the start of the day, most every attendee gathered under a large white tent to see Laura Eubanks summon the plant gods. It was there that the spunky 53-year-old San Diego landscape designer was transforming a large wooden planter filled with soil into a “succulent tapestry”—a Sandra Lee–esque tablescape of rubbery plants.

”This is Cynthia Giddy!” Eubanks exclaimed, her chipper voice carrying through a mic clipped to her ear. “One of my absolute favorite aloes of all time.” She held up a spiky reddish plant for the crowd, then unceremoniously turned it upside down and ripped the plant from its container. Soil poured past her jeans and onto her gardening boots, revealing its spindly roots. “Now, I don’t want to mess with that,” Eubanks said, gesturing to the aloe’s nether regions. “What a hot mess!” She grabbed a pair of gardening shears from her toolbelt, snipped away its lower half, and tucked the plant into her tapestry. “She’s just going to sit there and be gorgeous for a really long time.”

The woman beside me began whispering furiously to her friend: You really cut it all off? Eubanks has been in the drought-resistant landscape business for about six years, but her techniques are still somewhat brutalist for the garden-party set. Her method, briefly: (1) cut off a succulent’s roots and—depending on what you have—break it into small clusters; (2) weave the stray pieces together atop a pile of moss, dirt, driftwood, mulch, and decorative seashells; (3) spray it all with a thin layer of craft glue; and (4) let nature do the rest.

Alyssa Bereznak

This was an approach that, in her early days of experimentation, allowed Eubanks to make internet-friendly living succulent sculptures. It has also built up her allure as a landscaping personality. Eubanks has become the self-appointed spokesperson for a rising population of gardeners who are too preoccupied or broke to fuss over something as delicate as wilting rose petals. Her frequent “Succulent Tip of the Day” videos have captured the attention of indoor and outdoor gardeners from Australia to Utah on how to prune, rearrange, and protect these plants in as straightforward and practical a way possible. And her catchphrase—“If your succulent stands up, you’ve done your job”— has become the mantra of low-maintenance landscapers everywhere. When I talked to Eubanks at the event, she still seemed a little surprised by the turn of events. “I mean, if you had told me 10 years ago that my pet rock idea would be gluing plants onto shit, I would’ve been like, ‘Just shoot me now, is that really all I get?’”

Eubanks switched to succulents about six years ago, after growing tired of her traditional landscaping business. “It got to where I couldn’t keep up with the maintenance,” she told me after the demonstration. “Traditional plants need so much fertilizer—grooming and pruning and clipping and snipping—that I didn’t have time to do any more design work. I decided no more of this.” She passed her clients to an acquaintance, changed the name of her business to Design for Serenity, and declared her allegiance to succulents. Better to go with plants that were designed to care for themselves.

This is also around the time that Eubanks began, in her words, gluing plants onto shit. She made succulent jewelry for humans and pets. She glue-gunned a bucket of echeveria rosettes onto a moss-covered wire frame in the shape of an alligator. She wove succulents into little toupees and photographed them atop her bald brother’s head. And eventually she landed on hot-glue-gunning sphagnum moss and cuttings into the top grooves of pumpkins, which she sold as seasonal gifts at nearby nurseries. By 2012, the pumpkins had made Eubanks a local gardening celebrity. Her newfound fame caught the eye of Debra Lee Baldwin—commonly referred to by landscapers as “the queen” of the modern-day succulent craze—who eventually photographed and posted pictures of her creations. A few months later, Eubanks appeared in Baldwin’s third book, Succulents Simplified, as a featured designer. “It’s possible to use succulents in ways unthinkable with other plants,” Baldwin wrote. “Just wait ’til you see Laura Eubanks’s moss-and-glue method.”

Feeding off the publicity, Eubanks began shipping her pumpkin creations to customers across the country and filming daily video tips for Facebook and YouTube. The videos showed off her gardening aesthetic sense and no-nonsense approach. (Her catchphrases include “That’s a hot mess” and “run amuck-y.”) Little did Eubanks know that she’d planted her stake in a fertile plot of internet fandom. “Thank you for the videos,” wrote one commenter below a Eubanks tip about plant propagation last year. “I don’t have much money so i am growing my collection little by little. I can’t wait to see them grow to be big and vibrants like the ones in your videos.” Another fan from Australia credited Eubanks for inspiring her to finally understand gardening. “You are the reason I now am good friends with my succers,” the fan wrote. Eubanks eventually graduated to vlogging with a series called “My Succulent Life”; last month, she and her daughter traveled to Bali first class with the money they earned from the channel. (They documented the whole thing for fans.)

At the festival, the breadth of Eubanks’s online audience was apparent. There was, as per usual, a faction of discerning women in pastel visors and Marmot activewear—the classic Southern California gardening set—but also some unexpected attendees. A mother and her young daughter in matching Design for Serenity merchandise asked for a photo; afterward, the mom lifted up her pant leg to reveal a pair of socks printed with an anthropomorphic potted succulent that said “What’s up, succa?” Two other fans—women wearing large sun hats and fanny packs—raved to me about seeing Eubanks in person for the first time. “I’ve been following Laura from the videos and stuff,” one told me. “With Facebook I’m like, ‘Ahh, I get the up close and personal.’ Now I’m like, ‘Ahh, I get to meet Laura!’” A senior from a local high school presented a bag of avocados to Eubanks—a classic Californian gesture of appreciation—and asked whether he could be her assistant.

Colin Murray, an IT professional wearing a gray hoodie, long beard, sleeve tattoos, and nose and lip piercings, had flown in from Virginia with his coworker on Eubanks’s suggestion. His collection had begun with a modest jade plant a few years back, and he is now the proud plant father of more than 250 succulent species. He’d sought advice through Eubanks’s channel because caring for his collection in his state’s cold climates is tricky. Traveling to Southern California was also a rare opportunity to see his favorite varieties thrive in their natural habitat, much like spotting a giraffe on a safari. “Obviously we’re not from San Diego, but to watch Laura’s videos and kind of see this place before even coming here, it gives you an expectation,” he told me. “We just don’t have anything like this in Virginia. Seeing plants, cactuses, succulents just out in the ground is just incredible for us.”

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The earliest surviving image of a succulent comes from the rule of the Egyptian monarch Thutmose III, who lived during the 15th century B.C. His many successful invasions of nearby Syria helped him amass a large collection of plants, animals, and other spoils—all commemorated in wall drawings in a temple near Luxor. It is on one of these walls that plant historians have identified the unmistakable image of a kalanchoe. Thutmose III was ahead of his time in his proud plant parentage.

Over the past decade, horticultural and technological forces have collided to make succulents the unlikely heroes of modern gardening. Succulents, the plants defined by their fleshy, water-retaining leaves and stems, are inescapable in 2018. The various species can be found in Airbnbs, bridal bouquets, activewear ads, WeWorks, and restaurants around the world. Aspiring horticulturalists can buy them at Urban Outfitters, alongside a crop top and the latest Halsey album on vinyl, or at West Elm, paired with a $2,500 midcentury leather sofa. They are installed in the planters on Reese Witherspoon’s highly photogenic front porch. Their bulbous, carefully styled bodies are littered across millions of Instagram posts under hashtags like #succulove and #instaplant. At this very moment, there’s probably some sort of succulent slowly dying in a domestic space near you.

Throughout history, succulents have been used as herbal medicines, torture devices, food, dye sources, hallucinogens, and fixtures in religious ceremonies. But their captivating silhouettes, ability to endure long treks, and portability have carried them into the 21st century as the ideal collector’s item. The plants have graduated from filler greenery, to water-wise landscaping fixtures, to Instagrammable pioneers of the burgeoning online plant economy. In a society whose purchasing habits are driven by relentless trend cycles, they are the only plant resilient, varied, and multipurpose enough to keep up with frequent seasonal restylings of the retail sector. They have become the living ornaments of today’s idealized homes, gardens, and workspaces and, subsequently, the central characters in a new gardening movement that values ease over effort.

Illustration by Agata Wierzbicka

It was not always this way. As decorative beings, succulents spent most of the 20th century in the shadow of more delicate and colorful plant life. Whereas U.S. rose gardeners founded an official organization in 1892, the Cactus and Succulent Society of America didn’t materialize until 1929. (Cacti, though frequently separated from the term, are a type of succulent.) An early edition of its bimonthly journal alluded to the general public’s lack of knowledge about both native and foreign succulents. “The ignorance of many dealers has done more to hurt the cause than anything else,” a subscriber named John Soderberg wrote to the journal in November 1933. A dispatch in the August issue of that year alluded to the plants’ low market value amid the Great Depression. “Dealers in xerophytes have been having a hard time making a living,” a section titled “Cactus Culture” reads. “Plants have been selling at shameful prices.’”

Judy Pigue, the society’s current president, joined the organization amid a 1970s houseplant craze. “Back then, before cellphones and computers and everything, you went to the library to read about them,” Pigue told me. It turns out that Pigue was an inadvertent witness to the beginnings of the modern-day cactus-and-succulent economy. Many of the plant’s first major commercial farmers staked out land across the West Coast in the ’70s and ’80s; Southern California, with its plentiful sunshine, prolonged dry periods, moderate temperatures, and seaside mist, made it a kind of Xanadu for most species. But landscaping trends still very much revolved around the twiggy, woody perennials and bedding plants commonly found in English flower gardens. So growers focused on more popular moneymakers, while raising a modest collection of succulents and cacti on the side—some of which they were able to sell to East Coasters seeking resilient houseplants.

“In the 1970s in California, you couldn’t give a succulent away in Southern California,” says Waterwise Botanicals founder Tom Jesch, who founded his Bonsall nursery around that time, and later sold it to Altman Plants. “You could walk in with an echeveria sahara and a homeowner’s association would say, ‘You can’t plant that in your front yard because we don’t let any jade plants in our housing community.’ That’s how weird it was. In their minds, everything was a jade plant.”

Illustration by Agata Wierzbicka

Interest in the plants picked up in the ’90s, amid the experimentation fueled by California’s dot-com boom. Architects like Frank Gehry and Eric Owen Moss brought the deconstructivist movement to Los Angeles, producing hulking, shimmering slabs of buildings like the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The aesthetic also spread to younger homeowners who wanted to assert their modern design sensibilities. Subsequently, high-end landscapers began experimenting with new shrubbery for their clients, planting fountain-shaped succulents like aloes to highlight the striking angles of the buildings. “Garden design professionals are always looking for something new and visually intriguing,” Baldwin, who began covering Southern California gardens for Sunset magazine in the late ’90s, told me. “Using agaves was probably the first thing that was really dramatic and noticeable, especially with contemporary homes. Because you have really sleek, clean-lined architecture with sleek, clean-lined plants.”

Because landscaping trends tend to move slowly, succulents did not make their way into the common California garden overnight. Baldwin says she first saw the plants highlighted in homeowners’ magazines around 2005. At the same time, there was a renewed, climate-conscious push for gardeners to lessen their environmental footprints and water bills. When a drought hit the state in 2011, it was only logical that sedums and dudleyas would replace the postwar nuclear family lawns of the 1950s. “A lot of things started coming together at once,” Baldwin told me. “The ongoing drought in California had people scrambling for more water-wise gardens and how to cut down on water and lawn alternatives. Plants that, by definition, store water and can get by for long periods without it were just a perfect match for that.”

It was also around this time that millennials decided they wanted to get their hands dirty. In 2014, the National Gardening Association released a study that found that the “millennial food gardener” population—18- to 34-year-olds who prefer to grow their own produce—had expanded from 8 million to 13 million in the previous five years. And a study by the National Gardening Survey found that 5 million of the 6 million Americans who took up plant-related hobbies in 2015 were millennials.

The Washington Post/Getty Images

For a new generation of apartment dwellers who suddenly craved the company of plant life, the succulent was a cheap, simple, obvious, low-maintenance option that could fit easily on a cramped shelf or desk.

“It started when people were stiff for cash, and in the millennials’ case were not even leaving home,” said Ian Baldwin, an industry consultant. “They just wanted something green where they lived that was difficult to kill—a no-fuss, easy-to-care-for houseplant for people who were bored or frustrated or unemployed, or stuck in their life because of recession. And succulents fit that bill.”

As is the case with any new fount of online commerce in the 21st century, a handful of succulent-focused influencers popped up in response, filling Instagram with carefully curated feeds of their favorite plants in designer pottery. Accounts like @succulentcity and @succulove delighted in the plants’ mesmerizing shapes, vivid colors, and crafty versatility, amassing followings in the hundreds of thousands and encouraging followers to share photos of their own plant children. Startups like The Sill and Bloomscape capitalized on the trend, offering the convenience of in-store potting, online shopping, and speedy shipments. An entire aesthetic—minimalist furniture, crisp white walls, a splash of muted color and plenty of green succulents—was born.

For 156 years, government agencies have conducted an agricultural census to collect information on the country’s plant market trends. In 2014 the category of “cacti and succulents” was added to the survey; it grossed about $40.9 million in sales that year. (For comparison, annual bedding/garden plants grossed about $2.57 billion that year.) A 2017 Garden Center magazine survey of retailers found that cactus and succulent sales has jumped 64 percent since 2012. “The [retailer] space dedicated to succulents on shelves and tables and benches builds up every year,” Ian Baldwin told me. “Every year it goes up. It’s a trend, it’s going to crest at some point—but it’s not there yet.”

Before Altman Plants became the largest commercial succulent provider in the United States, it was just a humble cactus collection on a windowsill. Its founders and current owners, Deena and Ken Altman, lived together in college and began growing succulents in their self-described “hippie” years in the 1970s. Deena came from a family that owned a small rare-plant shop; while attending college in Pasadena, she gravitated toward the nearby Huntington Botanical Gardens Desert Garden of succulents and cacti. In a 2016 interview with the industry publication GrowerTalks, Ken recalls being blown away by a single bloom on one of their cactus children. “I think it was that flower that just took our hearts away.”

What began as a hobby eventually became a mail-order catalog, and then a full-time business as wholesale sellers. When the Altmans heard that Target needed a plant supplier, they struck a deal with the company selling both “color”—industry speak for flowering perennials—and their beloved succulents. As Altman grew to mass market, and became a distributor for companies like the Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Walmart, color overshadowed their succulent sales, which accounted for only 10 to 15 percent of business. But by 2016, the plants Deena and Ken favored had caught up to contribute to half of their sales. As major retailers began adding the plants to their product lists, Altman was there to heed the call.

Today, Altman Plants is the indisputable wholesale king of the succulent market, employing 3,331 people and selling tens of millions of plants each year. While the typical grower has three to five acres of production land, Altman owns about 500 just in San Diego, including 2 million square feet of greenhouse space. It also runs distribution and wholesale nurseries in a handful of other states. With the help of its two in-house plant breeders, Renee O’Connell and Kelly Griffin, it maintains a steady rotation of new plant releases, such as the pink-and-green-striped, patented aeonium “Mardi Gras” ($6) and the trippy, orange-tye-dyed echeveria “Chroma” ($5). Walking through one of Altman’s Vista, California, growing locations this spring felt a little like perusing the aisles of a candy store. Rows and rows of plants in pastel shades of orange, green, pink, red, and blue were lined up in white tents, each forming tantalizingly perfect, pristine shapes.

The other major player is, of course, Amazon. It launched a pilot program in 2016 that allowed customers to buy houseplants, some of which come potted, and have them delivered via Prime in just two days. Today it works with over 1,000 sellers, and offers more than 100,000 live plants and seeds on its website. Amazon’s program significantly lowered the barrier to entry for almost any novice plant owner, and almost overnight, it transformed the way millions of people buy greenery in America. Suddenly any plant-curious individual with a bare windowsill and a Prime subscription could type “succulent” into their search bar, click a few buttons, and receive a living thing on their doorstep that same week.

Jessica De Gennaro, the founder of Southern California–based Shop Succulents, started her e-commerce store in 2012, riding the Pinterest wave by selling 2-inch succulents that could be used in wedding bouquets, hair combs, and corsages. Her business had grown steadily, but it transformed the moment Amazon invited her to participate in its pilot program. “We saw a huge lift in sales,” she said. “And not long after that we partnered with them.” It turns out I was part of that uptick. Long before I spoke to De Gennaro for this piece, I had impulse-bought a variety pack of succulents from Amazon, which promptly arrived in the foyer of my small Brooklyn apartment building.

“In the beginning it really was a niche market,” De Gennaro said. “We were one of the very few people doing it. But when you take a look at a company like Amazon that decides, ‘Welp, we’re going to actually add this category to our massive list because it’s that impactful saleswise,’ you really realize how the landscape is shifting.” De Gennaro says sales have grown “exponentially” with the help of her Prime badge, and she has since expanded from basic succulents, cacti, and aloes to air plants and popular houseplants. Recently she premiered a “finished” product line, which styles the plants in ready-to-display pots and arrangements. Working with merchandise that can rot, wilt, smoosh, or fall apart means that De Gennaro is constantly refining her methods for shipping the plants across the country to ensure they don’t, as she calls it, arrive “as a pile of dirt.” Usually that means filling her specially sized, double-wall corrugated boxes with paper confetti and tucking it in cooling or heating pads to account for seasonal temperatures. She also has a friend in Detroit to whom she sends a “test shipment,” to see which varieties can hold and which can’t.

De Gennaro has since expanded her business to supply plants to customers of Wayfair.com, Zulily, Joss & Main, the Home Depot, and Urban Outfitters. She says there’s an adjustment process with each new partner the company takes on. Many major stores are accustomed to ground shipping, or require partner merchandise to be sent to distribution centers. But De Gennaro will act only as a direct-to-customer provider to ensure she can adhere to her strict two-day air shipping policy and maintain the integrity of her plants. In the case of Urban Outfitters, which has also recently begun displaying and selling plants in stores, she found herself wearing multiple hats, acting both as supplier and long-distance caretaker. She said that many of the chain’s employees had to be trained on how to keep the merchandise alive in the store. (Urban Outfitters did not respond to multiple interview requests.)

As more succulent photos began appearing in people’s social media feeds, a demand for “it” plants emerged. “Our buyer has become much more educated over the last two years,” De Gennaro told me. “We get a lot of emails looking for something new, something they haven’t seen before.” (One need look no further than the 134,000-subscriber subreddit r/succulents or the design-happy cult of plantstagram to confirm that plant owners now covet rare, colorful, and uniquely shaped plants, particularly those found in a category as varied as succulents.)

As a result, a handful of speciality stores have popped up to serve plant stans. Boutiques like the Cactus Store, Tula House, and The Sill approach their markets in the same way fashion designers approach the seasonal clothing cycle. The Cactus Store, a cramped, single-room plant boutique in Echo Park, specializes in rare cacti, and sells only potted plants. Every one of its cacti are installed in simple, muted terra-cotta pots, sprinkled with drab rocks, and propped up on cinder blocks to give off an aura of an aging bohemian’s dusty garage. Bushwick-based Tula House puts its plants in nature-toned designer ceramics, “styling” them in collections that coordinate with each season. The Sill opts for clean lines and pink, blue, and yellow pastels. In its flagship store, a “Plant of the Month” wall display acts as an educational tool to introduce customers to new species. (In April, it was Selaginella lepidophylla, a desert spike moss plant that curls into a tight ball when dehydrated.) According to the company’s founder, Eliza Blank, her team looks to trends in retail or home décor, and considers how to work them into their latest line of offerings. It’s for this reason that the store began pushing small, shippable heart-shaped succulents (hoya kerrii) around Mother’s Day, and why this summer Blank is betting big on “the urban jungle vibe” with calathea (prayer plants).

Alyssa Bereznak

Altman Plants has kept up with the demand for novelty by quite literally breeding new species. One of its current stars is the aloe blizzard, a descendant of the aloe doran black and a proprietary mystery suitor known only as aloe no. 51. The blizzard was bred to be prettier and stronger than its predecessors; it produces thick rosette clusters and fits naturally into the average 4-inch house plant pot. Its fleshy triangular leaf blades are a gray green—as if each were hand-painted by an impressionist—and decorated with elevated, jagged stripes that feel like Braille. Unlike the blizzard’s competitors, its pale color remains constant through the year, it blooms frequently, and it’s especially good at withstanding cross-country trips in the mail.

The blizzard was created by O’Connell in 2009, and since then it has become something of a collector’s item in the succulent community. It sells for $10 on the company’s website, or sometimes double that on rogue Etsy and eBay listings that describe it as “lovely” or “rare.” The plant’s adoring fans stretch across Facebook and Reddit; its name has appeared everywhere from The Washington Post to Curbed. Baldwin frequently highlights it on her website. My first encounter with one was at the Waterwise Super Succulent Celebration. While I was in line at a food truck, a woman approached me to show off her plant haul. Like many attendees that day, she had traveled several hours to have her pick of designer aloes. After showing me a millennial-pink delta dawn and a red-accented Christmas sleigh, she lingered on her prized possession, a blizzard. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” she said, as she scooped it out of her basket and held it up to my face. “The leaves are so light and creamy.” Inspired by her presentation, I wandered over to the houseplant section to pick one up for myself. But it was too late—they’d sold out for the day.

Illustration by Agata Wierzbicka

Succulents are the preppers of the plant kingdom. “One could talk for an hour on the marvels of ingenuity with which the Cacti have fitted themselves for life in hostile places,” Charles Gibbs Adams, one of the first presidents of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America, said at the 1933 Convention of the Federation of Natural Sciences. Hidden beneath succulents’ minimalist appeal are myriad adaptive advantages that make them particularly well positioned to survive cross-country shipping containers and millennial neglect. What began as a system to endure a desert draught or violent windstorm became a boon to interacting with the human race.

Succulents house an impressive amount of complicated biological work beneath their waxy surfaces, John Trager, the desert curator at the Huntington Botanical Gardens, told me. Their semipermeable membranes contain salt-enriched sap that help them absorb moisture from the outside world—one reason they frequently thrive in sunny, ocean-spritzed climates like California, and easily root anywhere you drop them. For another, their photosynthetic strategies are incredibly crafty. The average garden annual can photosynthesize only during the daytime, but a large group of succulents undergo this process at night during cooler temperatures by opening their pores and sucking in carbon dioxide. The result is that they’re able to save more water, and therefore survive longer. Morphologically speaking, the spiraling, rosette shapes formed by the short stems of agaves, aloes, and bromeliads are designed to maximize exposure to light and minimize getting knocked around from the wind. If you’ve ever noticed water drops bead up on a pedal of an echeveria, that’s because its thick, waxy skin is designed to repel water and direct it to the plant’s root node, where it can be put to better use.

“When succulents entered the [horticultural] scene, none can say, but it is fairly certain that it was early on because, with their inbuilt water supply, they are ideally predisposed to survive long dry journeys overland or overseas,” wrote Gordon Douglas Rowley in A History of Succulent Plants. The majority of succulents hail from regions like South Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and South and Central America, where temperatures fall on the warmer side and there are long dry spells in an annual weather cycle. Many early collectors stationed in more unpredictable environments focused on re-creating these conditions in their own gardens to protect from frost and excess rain. Crude greenhouse structures originated during classical times, and were meant to preserve exotic fruit trees and flowers for the Roman aristocracy. As glazing, glassmaking, and heating methods evolved in 1600s Europe, shelters known as “glasshouses” became the default home for succulents as well. In experimenting with new temperature-controlled growing rooms, an early 18th-century plant physiologist named Stephen Hales landed on what he saw as ideal growing temperatures of aloes, ficoides, and euphorbia.

Today, the tradition of succulent scouting and taming has become a sophisticated operation, one that has grown more valuable to suppliers like Altman Plants. In 2013, the company hired Kelly Griffin to manage its budding research-and-development division. The Redondo Beach native is a living legend among succulent suppliers. Over his illustrious career, the self-proclaimed “nerdy plant guy” has introduced more than 100 succulents to the market—some of which he discovered trekking through footpaths in Madagascar, and others that he spent years hybridizing in his lab. He is indisputably responsible for introducing the splashy oranges, reds, and blues that stretch across manicured gardens from Calabasas to Coral Gables. In 2013, Denver Botanic Gardens curator Panayoti Kelaidis credited his hybrids for having “propelled overnight the container succulent craze across the U.S.”

Griffin has been scouting and breeding succulents for the majority of his life. And yet, when I met him at the succulent festival for a tour of his creations, he couldn’t help but marvel at the geographical disconnect of customers who were scooping up his aloes. “You could make an analogy to orange juice,” he said. “Orange juice didn’t originally come from Florida or California, I hate to tell you, it came from another country. But, not only have we enjoyed it and grown it and used it—we’ve modified it, we’ve made it sweeter, we’ve made it better, we’ve made it fit our needs. Succulents are the same way. We can cultivate varieties through horticulture that will do better in our environment. You grow a thousand of them and you find one that performs better here.”

These days, all of his creations are meticulously bred to resist disease and extreme temperatures, reduce spiky surfaces, encourage better, more frequent flowering, and—most important—be extra colorful. His Christmas sleigh aloe, for instance, is designed to be both appealing and practical. Its rough, deep-green leaves are painted with raised red dots and lined with bright-red serrations that won’t prick your fingers. A hearty, easygoing plant, it grows less than a foot across and can thrive in either a home or a landscape. Most importantly, it looks very good on the internet.

Griffin likens the process of enhancing a plant’s looks to manipulating the saturation and depth of an image in Photoshop. In his view, breeders sometimes overdo the “enhance button” when, really, the best way to get a good hybrid is to start with strong breeds and see where that takes you. “If you want a good photo, it’s better to just take a good one,” he said.

Illustration by Agata Wierzbicka

In recent years, Griffin has also begun to see his aloe work—which he’s spent some 15 years perfecting—be lifted and mutated in emerging plant markets in Asia. Griffin says these counterfeit hybridizers will travel to Southern California, pick up a few popular plants, bring them home, breed them once or twice, claim they invented the look, and profit. Trager told me that enterprising ecological tours abroad frequently offer to show off a rare plant’s natural habitat, and end the experience by covertly selling it. Meanwhile, California wildlife officials recently busted thieves from Korea and China for plucking thousands of Dudleya farinosa plants from their wild Northern California habitats and trying to ship them back home. The plants can sell for up to $50 a piece abroad.

“That’s maybe the dark side of this resurgence of interest in succulents,” Trager told me. “There’s more pressure to collect new and interesting things in the wild. … It does happen with amazing regularity.”

The hardy succulent, it turns out, is no match for human ignorance. There is now an endless stream of new gardeners driven by various marketing forces to buy the aesthetically pleasing props, but clueless as to the amount of sunlight and water one needs to survive. While reporting this story, I’ve spoken to friends, acquaintances, strangers, and plant enthusiasts about their experiences in succulent caretaking. The conversations usually start with a whispered confession that they have killed a succulent. In return, I offer an account of my own neglect, counting off a haunting list of corpses, complete with names and causes of death. (This is not a practice unique to succulents; in fact a small library’s worth of online content now exists to recommend hard-to-kill houseplants—like the pothos or the sansevieria—to millennials.) For a moment we sit in mutual mourning, and then we trade gardening tips. Purchasing, naming, photographing, and then promptly killing a succulent may be more of a millennial rite of passage than caring for one.

Because the internet economy has chopped up the supply chain, many of the major retailers have been separated from the growers who can pass along caretaking knowledge. As a result, there’s a need for instruction. A handful of plant liaisons have stepped in to offer more direction to fledgling owners. Recent instructional books include How Not to Kill Your Houseplant, Living With Plants, and Baldwin’s third book, Succulents Simplified. The Sill includes a stylish “care card” with every plant.

Illustration by Agata Wierzbicka

Tula House has, by far, one of the most hands-on approaches to educating its clients. Located on the second floor of a warehouse building in Bushwick, the store’s windows are lined with the latest styles seen in interior design and on social media: monsteras, rubber plants, peperomia, and a healthy collection of cacti and succulents. The store sells a $100 maroon sweater with a cactus embroidery on it. Owners Christan Summers and Ivan Martinez also preside over a roving plant truck that drives around Brooklyn, canvassing neighborhoods with healthy plants and copious care tips. The store is open only on weekends. On Saturdays, its vice president of operations and partnerships, Kalei Buczek, runs intimate plant workshops.

“It is personal,” she said during one such session this spring. “I need to get to know you. What is your environment and your life like so I can match your personality, your lifestyle, your home environment? What are your hopes and dreams and your skill level so you can find a plant that is going to be interesting and really impressive to you? I don’t want to send you home with something you’re not going to have a good time with. It’s better to have a good time.”

The day I visited the store, Buczek was joined by Jason Chongue, a Melbourne-based plant evangelist who was promoting his new instructional gardening book, Plant Society. A huddle of about 10 plant owners crowded in among the jungle of merchandise. “Congratulations,” Buczek said. “You’re all already better plant parents for being here. You showed up. You’re putting in the time. So, yay you. Let’s meet some plants.” For the next 80 minutes, the two led the crowd around the room, introducing us to a variety of different species and inviting us to finger their soil and pinch their leaves.

Between advice on how to deal with radiators and poor air circulation, Chongue and Buczek sprinkled in lessons that also applied more generally to life. “It’s not really shopping, it’s more like dating,” Buczek said. “If you have a basement apartment in Bushwick and you have no light, you probably can’t have a cacti. You can try, but you’re gonna have a bad time.” One customer inquired about the size of her plants’ pots, and Chongue offered his own aphorism for the topic. “It’s like buying your children clothes; you go one size up or it’s too big, they’re just going to drown in it.” As we made our way to a table covered in succulents, he emphasized an unexpected point: Plants can’t survive on light bulbs. “We get that all the time,” Chongue said. “People will put a succulent in a dark room with no natural light, and then wonder why it’s died. I always say, well, why don’t you lock yourself in the room and see what happens to you?”

All the while, the group hung on every word. Couples hashed out their mistakes on the sidelines. Occasionally a member of the group expressed a personal revelation with an “ooooh” or a silent nod. Through counseling from Buczek, one inquisitive plant owner realized she had suffocated her ferns with care. “I love them. I really do,” she offered as a half-defense, as the crowd looked on with mutual sympathy.

Houseplants, and succulents in particular, have become a kind of millennial comfort blanket, a low-stakes adult accessory that falls somewhere on the scale of responsibility between Neopet and actual pet. They’re indifferent ambassadors from the wild, a green spot on digitally overloaded lives. The e-commerce gods deliver them in two days’ time. They arrive fat and rubbery and game for whatever stylish container is on hand. They are Instagrammable proof that we’re not alone, and maybe that we’re also living a life worth Instagramming. They are biological mirrors for our generation’s own weathered mind-sets: muted, weird, independent survivalists whether they’re in a desert or on a desk.

At the end of the workshop, some of the group lined up to purchase Chongue’s book, while others cornered Buczek for one-on-one plant counseling. As the early-afternoon sun peeked through the room’s plant-lined windows, I felt a sense of envy—Imagine the cacti I could raise with a southern-facing window in my studio!—and a deep camaraderie with the group. We were all concerned plant parents, hoping that even if we weren’t quite in the position to be homeowners, or actual parents, we could find peace in keeping a living thing alive.

Additional reporting by Kate Halliwell.

An earlier version of this piece misspelled the name of industry publication GrowerTalks; it also contained a caption that misidentified the photo’s location, which was The Sill in Manhattan.