New Austin store’s speciality: How not to kill your plants

It’s hard to overstate the appeal of bringing lush, healthy greenery into your indoor spaces. Plants bring color and life into your interior landscape, along with a feeling of well-being, part due to their air purifying qualites. Incorporating plants in your decor, at home and at the office, is a time-honored and noble design tradition—as is killing them with neglect, kindness, or a combination of the two.

A proliferation of online plant stores as well as a healthy, growing array of local gardening stores has made it easier than ever to bring potted plants into your life, but the former, at least, is often lacking in telling you how to keep them alive once you’ve lovingly put them in just the right place in home or office.

The opening of a brick-and-mortar space by Austin-based Desk Plants promises to fill that void, not only advising you on (and selling you) plants but providing hand-on help with keeping them thriving—it even has a plant help line.

Founded by Austinite Lawrence Hanley, who started the business in 2018 with booths at local farmers markets and pop-ups in offices offices around the city, Desk Plants has otherwise been an online-only purveyor of fine indoor foliage, Its first storefront, which just opened at the Domain, should fill the gap for those who need a little more hand-holding, as well as offer a more sensory buying experience than online shopping—which, let’s face it, has its limits when one is purchasing furniture and decor, not to mention living things.

Courtesy of Desk Plants

In terms of choosing plants that should do well inside, Desk Plants does the curation for you. Their selection offers all low-maintenance and hard-to-kill indoor tropicals of all sizes, so all have to do is pick a plant, pick a pot, have it potted while you wait, and receive easy-to-follow instructions on how to not kill your plant. The new retail space will also offer a variety of classes in the store (not all plant-related) and workshops geared for beginners.

And if that all that somehow still fails, there’s always the hotline.