#indoor trees are the hot new plant trend

Lockdown brought on a wave of nostalgic video gaming, the sourdough-starter craze and now, ambitious indoor landscaping. With New Yorkers still stuck at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, longtime plant parents and new collectors alike are testing the limits of their green thumbs. They’re passing up simple, low-maintenance succulents for space-stealing trees and exotic shrubs in an effort to beautify their apartments and invite more nature into the urban jungle.

“As soon as people were locked in their homes, they realized how miserable their apartments were, so they decided to flush it with plants,” Amelia Fieldhouse, a sales rep at Greenery Unlimited in Greenpoint, told The Post.

The 30-year-old Bushwick resident said sales at work “shot up” once the pandemic hit, and she understands the impulse. She keeps about 120 plants in her own apartment, including a 5 1/2-foot fiddle-leaf fig tree that’s as tall as she is.

For some plant lovers, working from home is an opportunity to up their growing game.

“My students know me as the lady with all the plants in my Zoom background,” said Yana Kucheva, 39, a sociology professor at City College. A longtime foliage fan, she estimates she has 200 plants in her two-bedroom apartment in Harlem. But she’s stepped it up by cultivating crops in her less-than-tropical digs. “I have a ton of LED grow lights hanging from the ceiling or from shelves,” said Kucheva, which she uses to nurture pots of leafy lettuce, tomatoes, peppers and herbs.

Kucheva, who also owns a fiddle-leaf fig, is the proud owner of a number of fussy miniature citrus trees — calamondin, lemon and kumquat — that each produce only a few fruits per year. In February, she scored a variegated banana tree off Instagram for $200.

“I just had to have it,” Kucheva said. “It should produce bananas — but it hasn’t yet.”

Keeping a big tree alive in a tiny apartment is a social-media-friendly flex. But that might not be the only reason why the trend is spreading.

Nick Cutsumpas, a plant consultant based in LA, said he sees a connection between the grocery shortages in the spring and the rise in apartment farming.

“People are graduating from houseplants to gardening and growing their own food — even on their fire escape,” Cutsumpas said. “Seed companies have been sold out for months.”

He also said that caring for high-maintenance flora can be meditative. “There’s a lot of companies popping up selling tree varieties like birds of paradise, bonsai and citrus that require daily care,” said Cutsumpas, 28. “It’s becoming part of people’s self-care routines.”

But Cutsumpas said even the most Type-A New Yorkers need to know their limits when it comes to tending crops inside. “Plant selection has to start with your space,” he said. “I was working with a client who [had]… a Southern magnolia in a pot, and I’ve never seen those grown inside. It was by a north-facing window, so it gets the least amount of light. And it was next to a heater, so it was drying out, too.”

He added: “You need to be honest about what you can grow.”

Fieldhouse, who keeps her apartment balmy, even in the summer, to appease her plants, warns that the most picturesque ones can take tons of work. “They’re like grumpy old men,” said Fieldhouse of the Instagram-famous fiddle-leaf fig. “The older they are, the harder it is.”

But she said she loves a good challenge. Recently, she ate a store-bought mango — not indigenous to the Northeast, let alone the city — and lovingly kept the seed. “I wrapped it in a moist paper towel and stuck it to the window, so it got light,” she said. “Once it rooted after a couple of weeks, I planted it.”

Does Fieldhouse expect to reap what she’s sowed? “Absolutely not. But if it does, that would be probably the best experience of my life.”