What 350,000 indoor plant deliveries told us about Britain's houseplants
After a few years of posting houseplants all across the UK, we ended up with something more useful than a mood board: we have a spreadsheet 🤓. 350,000 indoor plant deliveries' worth of date. So we sat down and worked out what people in different cities were actually buying, as opposed to whatever Pinterest had decided was in that week. The regional patterns were close to what we'd expected but also a few curve balls. One of them we still can't explain.
What follows is a city by city look at real indoor plant delivery data: which houseplants actually sell and where, rather than which ones photograph best.
The most popular houseplants in each UK city
London: Areca Palm. Londoners order the Areca Palm more than any other houseplant. Given how small the average London flat is, and how reluctant the light can be in a ground floor conversion, that makes a kind of practical sense. An Areca grows up rather than out, and it tolerates a bad week. The Boston Fern came second by a whisker.
Manchester: Swiss Cheese Plant. Manchester buys more Monsteras than anywhere else in the country. It is a houseplant for people who want the room to notice.
Bristol: a tie. Bristol split evenly between the Boston Fern and the Swiss Cheese Plant and refused to pick a side, which seems about right.
Glasgow: Areca Palm. Glasgow lands on the same houseplant as London, though probably for a different reason. The Areca copes with low light better than most big leafy plants, and Scottish winters are short on daylight.
Edinburgh: Radiator Plant 'Hope'. Edinburgh was the only city that picked something small. While everyone else ordered drama, Edinburgh quietly bought a tidy little Peperomia that asks almost nothing of its owner. One of the easiest indoor plants we sell. Read into that whatever you like.
The unexpected houseplant favourites
Oxford: Wandering Dude Nanouk. Oxford's favourite is a trailing Tradescantia with bright pink and purple leaves that has become one of the most photographed houseplants on Instagram. It looks like something you'd find on a windowsill in an old college room, which may be part of the appeal.
Leeds: String of Turtles. Leeds has a quiet thing for the String of Turtles, a fiddly little trailing Peperomia with leaves that actually do look like miniature tortoise shells. It's not a beginner houseplant. You have to already be into indoor plants to want one, which suggests Leeds has a more committed plant scene than it tends to get credit for.
Liverpool: Venus Fly Trap. Then there's Liverpool, which keeps ordering Venus Fly Traps. Not occasionally. Regularly. While most of the country is buying tropical foliage, Liverpool has settled on a carnivore. Nobody here has been able to account for it and we've stopped trying.
What 7,000 customer emails taught us about indoor plant delivery
The city data is the fun bit, but it sits inside something bigger. Our indoor plant delivery business has roughly doubled every year for a while now, and keeping up with that has meant paying proper attention to what customers tell us, rather than skimming it between other jobs. A few months ago we sat down and read every email we'd had in two years. All 7,000 of them. Not a sample.
Reading that much feedback in one go is a slightly odd experience. Things you'd half-noticed start to look obvious. People were buying houseplants and forgetting the pot, then emailing us the next day, so we changed the checkout to suggest a matching pot before they hit the button. People couldn't find popular categories of indoor plants through the old search bar, so we rebuilt it. None of it was clever. Most of it was overdue.
To put some numbers on it: 350,000-plus houseplants delivered, over 5,750 customer reviews, 7,000-odd emails read.
A houseplant care library built from real questions
The houseplant care library came out of the same exercise. Ninety articles on caring for indoor plants, with a search bar that takes normal questions (the "why is my Peace Lily yellow" kind) and actually tries to answer them. We built it because the same few dozen questions kept coming in, and it felt faintly rude to keep answering them one at a time while the open web offered generic advice that helped nobody.
What's next for UK houseplant trends
We'll run the city data again later in the year to see whether houseplant tastes shift with the seasons: whether the Areca holds up through winter, or whether the darker months push people toward smaller, lower-light indoor plants like the Radiator. If your city didn't appear, it means we haven't had enough orders from there yet. That is fixable.