Do you know a good... plant stylist?

Lisa Muñoz puts the chic in chicory as she teaches us how to fashion our ferns

By Catherine Nixey

Meet… Lisa Muñoz, plant stylist. The Capability Brown of New York’s brownstone apartments. A woman who can put the chic in chicory and, if you’re really lazy, the water in your flowerpots. Though, on the whole, Lisa prefers more eccentric vessels. Test tubes, she says “are more visually interesting”.

So Muñoz is a flower arranger? Absolutely not. Lisa would no more murder a marigold for display than a millennial would slaughter swine for supper. Lisa doesn’t work with cut flowers “at all” and indeed finds them “a little heartbreaking”. Lisa instead takes living plants, and styles them.

How much styling does a plant need? She offers less style than succour. Plants, not unlike their millennial owners, are delicate. They can, Muñoz explains, find it “a little jarring” to be brought into a new home or an office. “Sometimes plants will get stressed.”

Plants get stressed? Absolutely. That’s why they need Muñoz. Think of her as a psychotherapist for succulents. She’ll teach you why you shouldn’t fiddle with your fiddle-leaf fig and how not to monster a Monstera.

A what? A Monstera. Botanists know them as a genus of flowering plants in the arum family. Your mum probably knows them as a Swiss cheese plant. But ignore her. All you need to know is that they are the geraniums of Gen Z, the stars of a social-media trend and, says Muñoz, “the talk of the town”. Botanists date their evolution to the Late Cretaceous period. Muñoz is, however, referring to #monsteramonday, which has been around for a couple of years. Which, in the social-media world, is basically Jurassic.

How stylish can a plant get? Extremely. Fig leaves haven’t been such essential accessories since Eve first spotted that snake. Though if Eve wanted to be really chic she’d have ditched Ficus carica and gone instead for the achingly fashionable fiddle-leaf version. Then again, given how much trouble she had with the common-or-garden apple, perhaps it’s best she didn’t.

Who are her customers? “Movie stars,” says Muñoz, though non-disclosure agreements mean she won’t say which ones. And a swishy New York architect called Elizabeth Roberts, who did Maggie Gyllenhaal’s home and who specialises in a style best described as mutedly expensive white things.

Anyone else? “I hate to say it,” says Muñoz. Then says it: “Millennials.” The tribe’s fogeyish enthusiasm for Victoriana is unabated. Having already appropriated gin, handlebar moustaches and censoriousness, they have now moved on to houseplants. Edgy apartments on Instagram now peer, Dr Livingstone-like, through thickets of deep-green foliage.

How much does it cost? Think tulipmania, then add a few dollars: $50,000 “tends to be the higher end” of what she charges. Personal consultations start at a mere $2,000.

And the plants? Not cheap either. What more hedonistic generations would have spent on good-quality weed, this generation is paying for hardy perennials. During a particularly frenzied period recently, Chinese money plants, even tiny ones, were changing hands for $75 a pot.

Is it worth it? Millennials think so. And as Muñoz says, “The world is troubled and plants are making people slightly less stressed out.”

Illustration Beth Hoeckel

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