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Rose Maura Lorre is a writer on Wirecutter’s discovery team. She has reported on turkey fryers, composters, body pillows, and more. Modern Dining Chairs
Nature is everywhere, but sometimes a brick-and-mortar store selling happy and healthy houseplants seems impossible to find. When the charming, local plant shop of your dreams refuses to materialize in reality, purchasing houseplants from an online plant purveyor can be the next best thing.
We tested five of the most popular services and found that Rooted is the best place to buy plants online when you’re shopping for a gift, while Horti is best for beginning to intermediate houseplant hobbyists who are shopping for themselves and want a reliable, affordable online plant shop.
We looked for features on each company’s website that help customers find suitable plants and make informed purchasing decisions.
Plants should be carefully packed to prevent damage or disruption in transit, so we timed how long it took us to unbox them.
Undamaged, unblemished leaves were important. We also checked for pests and confirmed whether plants came in a good growing medium.
We made affordability a priority, favoring services that allowed folks to build out their plant collections at a reasonable cost.
This user-friendly website offers the most affordable houseplants we tested. Though the plants didn’t always arrive in flawless condition, Horti places a strong emphasis on giving customers the knowledge they need to help their plants thrive.
From ordering through delivery, we were impressed by Horti’s attention to detail. Plants were packed and shipped with care. We also appreciated the company’s commitment to educating its customers on best houseplant practices, both on its website and in the literature it includes in its shipments.
Horti offers a fun array of indoor houseplants, including rare, low-light, full-sun, pet-friendly, hard-to-kill, and hanging varieties. The wide selection should keep repeat customers feeling enthusiastic about returning to the site for more options as they grow their plant collections and become more confident in their green-thumb abilities. The fact that Horti’s prices are lower than those of the other sites we tested also bodes well for folks looking to purchase multiple plants, either all at once or over time. (For more on how much houseplants typically cost, as well as how we chose the plants we ordered, see How we picked and tested below.)
We ordered three Sansevieria snake plants and three Pilea peperomioides Chinese money plants from Horti. We ordered two of the snake plants and two of the money plants in 4-inch plastic grow pots; the snake plants cost $18 each, while the money plants cost $20 each. We also ordered one of each plant with a 6-inch “Horti white pot,” which is what the company calls its terra-cotta plant pot hand-painted with a slanted white stripe along the bottom. The snake plant with a 6-inch Horti white pot cost $36, while the money plant with a 6-inch Horti white pot cost $38.
On all Horti orders we placed, shipping cost extra, ranging from about $10 to about $14 per two-plant shipment. Because we ordered our plants in winter, Horti added a heat pack to each shipment at no additional cost.
Deliveries are thoughtfully packaged. Horti’s deliveries took us the longest to unpack, at an average of just under four minutes. As one tester described her shipment’s contents: “Everything was tightly packed inside in a way that neither plant could move.”
Our Horti packages all came with heat packs (one was still giving off heat upon arrival), as well as the most labels (such as “This Side Up,” “Handle With Care,” and “Be Gentle—Live Plants Inside”) in comparison with the other services we tested. Perhaps not coincidentally, Horti got the highest marks for packages that were clean on the inside, with hardly any spilled dirt.
The printed and online care instructions are top-notch. “Horti had the most delightful in-package materials out of the bunch,” one tester raved. Each plant came with its own care card, listing that particular species’s light, water, and warmth needs. The cards also stated whether a particular plant was toxic to pets. Three additional cards gave tips for repotting and watering, as well as best practices for helping your plant acclimate to its new home. (Strangely, though, one of our three shipments did not include these care cards.)
For more info on topics such as “How to Overcome Your Brown Thumb” and “What Makes a Happy Plant?” the cards direct you to the website’s Care section, which reads like a fun blog that we would enjoy referring to again and again.
The soil comes in great condition. Although our Horti plants arrived looking a little weary, we appreciated how they were potted and what they were potted in. Our money plants arrived in sufficiently damp soil with moistened paper towels on top, while our snake plants arrived in suitably drier (but not concerningly dry) conditions.
As best we could tell by closely examining each plant’s growing medium, our Horti plants were each potted in a specific medium according to needs; for example, the snake plants appeared to be potted in succulent soil rather than an all-purpose mix. One tester called this attention to detail “quite distinct compared to other companies.” In addition, the two plants we ordered with Horti white pots each came with a dehydrated organic soil wafer (an included slip of paper identified them as Wonder Soil Planting Mix Wafers) to encourage repotting the plants from the plastic nursery pots they were sent in. (Two of the experts we spoke to said that repotting a newly received plant is a good idea, even if it is shipped in good soil; see “Tips for taking care of a new houseplant” below.)
The site really tries to sell you a subscription. Horti goes hard on its Plant Subscription Box options, which we did not specifically test. While Horti’s homepage makes it appear as if subscriptions are all the company offers, hovering over “Shop” in the top-bar menu reveals the options for à la carte plant shopping. Items are helpfully grouped into categories such as hard-to-kill plants, low-light plants, and full-sun plants. We do, however, wish that we could further winnow down those categories with sort-by filters such as “Price: Low to High” or “Price: High to Low,” which are not available on the site.
The plants aren’t the prettiest of the bunch. Our testers described three of the six plants we received from Horti as “a little ragged,” “a little droopy,” and “not the spiffiest, but not the worst.” While imperfections do not indicate that a plant is diseased or doomed, we had certainly hoped not to see them in a plant arriving straight from a commercial nursery. (In general, though, don’t fret if your plant arrives looking a little underwhelming. As The New Plant Collector author Darryl Cheng told us, “You can just clip off any browned tips or damaged leaves… People do often treat imperfect plants like they bought a white T-shirt and it arrived with a stain on it, but a plant is a living thing and there’s a lot of recovering it can do.”) We received a money plant from Horti that shed four of its leaves soon after we took it out of the box, although we felt good about the plant’s overall fullness even after those leaves abandoned ship; we were also pleased to see that a pup (a baby plant) was starting to peek through the soil.
One of the snake plants we received from Horti came with some tan marks along the edges and a leaf that was crispy and crumbling at the very tip—but again, we were confident in the plant’s vitality overall, as it boasted a healthy root system and also had a pup making its way to the surface. Although we may not want to give Horti’s not-always-perky-looking plants as gifts, we’re comfortable recommending them for people who want to buy plants for themselves because they were well priced, they (usually) arrived with loads of helpful literature, and they appeared to be packaged with care.
You have only one “nice” pot option. Aside from a plastic nursery pot, the only other planter Horti offers is its signature terra-cotta pot painted with an angular stripe across the bottom. We would appreciate seeing a greater variety of pot options, especially for gift purposes.
With lots of on-site search options and a colorful selection of chic ceramic planters available, this site is a great place to shop for an affordable houseplant to give as a gift (including for yourself).
Horti and Rooted ran neck and neck (stem to stem?) across several categories in our testing. Like Horti’s website, the Rooted site is easy to navigate and has an approachable vibe. Also like Horti, Rooted sent shipments that were thoroughly labeled on the outside and carefully packaged on the inside, resulting in a small, manageable amount of loose soil appearing in two of the three shipments we received.
Rooted is a similarly affordable plant site, with prices often just a few dollars above Horti’s. And as with Horti, we found that Rooted’s plants arrived in suitable soil that seemed to have been well tended to before shipping. Although a couple of the six plants we received looked less than perfect upon arrival, the majority received high marks from our testers on overall appearance.
One of the key factors that set Rooted apart from Horti is its planter selection. On many (though not all) of Rooted’s product pages, you have the option to add a minimalist-chic ceramic planter available in several colors, which we think makes Rooted the better choice for gift givers in comparison with Horti, although it would be better still if Rooted offered multiple styles of planters to choose from rather than a single style of planter available in multiple colors.
We ordered two golden pothos plants in a 4-inch nursery pot for $22 each, two small Laurentii snake plants in a 4-inch grow pot for $22 each, a Pilea peperomioides money plant in a 4-inch grow pot for $22, and a Zeylanica snake plant in a 4-inch grow pot with a pink ceramic planter for $55. Shipping cost extra, about $10 per order. We also paid $5 more per shipment for Rooted’s winter packaging, which includes a heat pack and a “cool-shield thermal wrap.” (The wrap kind of looks like those foil sheets that marathoners drape themselves in after a race.)
The site offers superior searchability. Rooted goes above and beyond the search filters we deemed important when testing for this guide. The site’s top-of-page drop-down menu groups plants into the usual categories of pet friendly, low light, rare, and the like, but also by space consideration, as in hanging plants, floor plants, shelf plants, bathroom plants, office plants, and so on. You can then filter each of those categories further by plant size, light, watering schedule, care level, humidity, and more—and that’s in addition to the standard sort-by bar on the right side of the page, which lets you sort alphabetically, by price, and by other factors.
The plants make a good first impression. Especially for gift-giving purposes, we wanted to see plants that arrived looking happy and healthy. Although we spotted some imperfections on the plants we received from Rooted, the company ranked first overall when we compared how many of a company’s plants made a favorable first impression on our testers versus a lackluster one. One tester said the snake plant she received from Rooted “looks better than most I’ve seen.” Another tester said that the plants were on the small side, but that they were “nice and healthy in appearance.” One of our golden pothos plants arrived with a yellowed leaf, as well as some leaves with black edges, but overall it looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed straight out of the box and was even sporting some new growth.
The ceramic planters come with organic potting mix. When you add a ceramic planter to your order, the company throws in a small bag of all-purpose potting mix, which we think rounds out a gift order nicely.
We saw evidence of pests. We spotted only a couple of signs of common houseplant pests during our testing, but one Rooted golden pothos had multiple spider mite strings attached. We didn’t see any mites, which means the bugs could have visited this plant in the nursery and then moved on, but even so, our tester who found the spider mite strings on her Rooted golden pothos said, “I would quarantine this plant.” (For more on why quarantining is a good idea for any new plant, see “Tips for taking care of a new houseplant” below.) Spider mites can do cosmetic damage to a houseplant but are rarely lethal, so they’re more of an inconvenience than an existential threat. Getting rid of them can be as easy as forcefully spraying a plant’s leaves with warm water a few times; if that doesn’t work, the University of Minnesota extension office has some other good advice for how to get rid of spider mites.
Easy-care plants are hard to find. While we were impressed by Rooted’s search functions, the main drop-down menu doesn’t include an easy-care category, which might be of great use to plant newbies. The site has a “No Sweat” filter, but finding it takes a few more clicks; look for it under “Care Level” on any category page.
The included care literature is lacking. Our shipments from Rooted provided a QR code printed on a flier that takes you to an online FAQ page. However, as one of our testers noted, the FAQ page “is not particularly helpful for caring for the actual plants you received.”
This guide is intended for the relatively novice houseplant hobbyist who wants to buy from a reliable and reasonably affordable online plant shop that helps them expand their green-thumb knowledge. It’s also for the gift giver who may not be very familiar with houseplants but still wants to impress and delight a plant lover by sending them a lovely-looking bit of greenery while also feeling confident in their purchase.
Although our picks would certainly suit plant lovers of all levels of expertise, veteran plant owners may prefer more niche or specialized online purveyors. In addition, one of the benefits of learning how to properly select and care for houseplants is that you may eventually feel up to the challenge of growing houseplants from seeds or bare-root shipments, which tend to cost significantly less than full-grown plants shipped in potted soil.
I have kept a houseplant-filled home for the past seven or so years and previously wrote about my houseplant passion in a Wirecutter article on where to find houseplants on the cheap.
To help test and review houseplant shipments for this guide, I recruited four of the biggest green thumbs on Wirecutter’s editorial staff, including associate staff writer Ellen Airhart, who has written extensively about houseplants for Popular Science, and deputy audience director of search Sebastian Compagnucci, who has covered gardening for Wirecutter and shares his native-plant knowledge on Instagram.
I also interviewed three houseplant experts to help inform our testing strategies: Darryl Cheng, author of The New Plant Collector: The Next Adventure in Your House Plant Journey; Nick Cutsumpas, author of Plant Coach: The Beginner’s Guide to Caring for Plants and the Planet; and Jane Perrone, author of Legends of the Leaf: Unearthing the Secrets to Help Your Plants Thrive.
After combing Reddit’s r/houseplants subreddit, reading dozens of online reviews, and polling Wirecutter staffers on the plant-delivery services they’ve used, we identified 22 of the most popular and most recommended places to buy plants online. We eliminated any specialty sites, such as those that sell only succulents or rare, tropical plants.
We then combed through each remaining company’s website in search of user-friendly features that can help create a fun, fast, and fruitful shopping experience, whether the shopper wants to send a plant as a gift or buy one for their own collection. Those features included:
From each of the five services that best met the above criteria, we ordered six popular plants: three snake plants, plus three pothos or Chinese money plants, depending on what was in stock. (We did not test indoor trees for this guide, but we have tested and recommended the Meyer lemon tree from Fast Growing Trees in a gift guide.) We chose those species because we wanted to test plants of different shapes and sizes; snake plants are typically tall, with sturdy leaves that stand up straight, while pothos plants usually sport long vines of trailing leaves that are much more malleable and delicate. When the pothos plants were unavailable, we chose the money plants as a next-best option.
We had the plants shipped to our office in Long Island City, New York, as well as to testers in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Washington, and we unboxed them as quickly as possible after their arrival.
We tested each shipment on the following criteria:
We were eager to test Bloomscape, which met our criteria for website user-friendliness. However, when we ordered plants in mid-January 2024, the company informed us that it was placing a “weather hold” on shipments due to a stretch of subfreezing temperatures across many parts of the US. In a follow-up email, Bloomscape told us that we would need to reorder once temperatures improved, but it didn’t give us guidelines for when that might be. (Other services we tested delayed our orders temporarily and then put them through automatically once temperatures became less extreme.) Although we appreciate that Bloomscape was attuned to the needs of its live plants, its policies left us unable to test them this time around. We hope to add them to our testing for future iterations of this guide.
Perhaps the best known online plant purveyor out there, The Sill boasts an enticing online interface that easily met our expectations for a user-friendly platform. Its plants, though often on the small side, arrived showing no signs of pests and the least amount of damage—except for one pothos that arrived in a particularly blemished and bedraggled state. It had several black tips along the edges of its stems and leaves, as well as an alarming amount of brown spots on the undersides of multiple leaves.
We contacted the company through its press-inquiry email address to ask about the cause of the spots, our message accompanied by photos, and were told that they were most likely a result of cold damage—despite the fact that The Sill’s heat packs were the best-performing of the bunch, with two of our testers noting that the packs were still “warm” or “very warm” upon arrival. The email also stated, “Given the small size and spread of those spots, this looks like minor cold damage [and] it’s most likely that the plant will make a full recovery.” Still, the representative offered to send us a new plant as part of the company’s 30-Day Happiness Guarantee, which we appreciate.
The Sill also performed poorly in our packaging tests: Its shipments were not well labeled in comparison with those from other companies, and two of our Sill orders arrived with lots of loose dirt knocking around the inside of the box. (In both cases, we suspect that a lack of “This Side Up” labels may have been to blame.) Meanwhile, one of the money plants we received from The Sill arrived with soil so damp that our tester noted, “It almost seems overwatered.” The biggest drawback to The Sill, though, is the pricing: For example, a pothos plant in a 4-inch plastic nursery pot cost $48, more than twice as much as a similar-size pothos from Horti, Leaf & Clay, or Rooted.
Leaf & Clay finished in the middle of our testing pack. The plants looked healthy and pretty and came potted in suitable soil, although one snake plant arrived in soil that was inexplicably wet. However, we found other features to be lacking. Its packages didn’t have a lot of helpful labels on the outside or care literature on the inside. During the ordering process, we did not see an option to add heat packs to our orders, although, unlike with Lively Root (see below), none of our Leaf & Clay plants arrived showing signs of frostbite. Leaf & Clay’s packages didn’t take particularly long to open, which is perhaps why two of our snake plants arrived with loose soil spilled around the interior of the box. In one of our Leaf & Clay shipments, we found spider mite strings, but no actual mites. We reached out to Leaf & Clay for comment about these issues but did not receive a response before press time.
Although Lively Root claims in a 2021 blog post that it ships plants when needed in a thermal blanket, a thermal wrap, and a “72-hour heat pack” to prevent cold damage, we did not see any such options during our ordering and checkout process when placing our three orders in early 2024, and at least one of our plants suffered for it. A snake plant arrived showing signs of cold damage, with two of its leaves appearing wrinkly, spongy, and wilted. In the days and weeks following that plant’s arrival, those leaves slowly died.
We were also flummoxed by the company’s “dirt bags,” which each potted plant arrived in. These fabric drawstring pouches are purportedly meant to “prevent soil spills during your plant’s journey to their new home.” However, two of our Lively Root snake plants arrived a total mess, with an excess of soil that had seemingly been flung all over the boxes’ interiors while in transit. These setbacks were particularly dismaying, as our testers were otherwise quite impressed by Lively Root’s plants, particularly the snake plants. As one tester put it: “It’s sad, because the snake plant is the nicest of the three I received.” We contacted Lively Root for comment about these issues but did not receive a response before press time.
Ideally, any plant you order will arrive at your door in tip-top shape—but even if it does, administering a little hands-on TLC can give it the best shot at thriving in your new home. Here are some to-dos that our experts recommended:
Repot it in an ideal growing medium. “Sometimes plant providers will not sell the plant in the correct soil that it should be in, so as a matter of practice, I always will repot a new plant in fresh soil,” Nick Cutsumpas said. Even if you feel good about the soil your plant arrived in (as we did with our Horti and Rooted shipments), there are worthwhile reasons to repot a plant upon receipt. Repotting can ensure that the soil is properly packed, or that the plant isn’t already root-bound and in need of a larger pot to call home. In our testing, some plants were so loosely potted that they practically fell right out of the soil, while others were clearly ready to be upsized into a larger container.
Check for pests. Once you’ve unpotted your plant, inspect it closely with a magnifying glass or the Magnifier app on an iPhone for spider mites, mealybugs, and scale. (Fungus gnats and root mealybugs can also be a problem, but since they live in soil, you can chalk them up as another reason to repot your plant in fresh soil upon arrival.) A preferred hiding place for many bugs is the underside of leaves, Custsumpas said, as well as where each leaf meets the stem. Darryl Cheng added, “If you see any sort of little spot or dot on a leaf, try to flick it away or blow it off. If it was something like a piece of dust, it’ll just fly off, but if it’s thrips, mealybugs, scale, spider mite shells, or spider mites themselves, it won’t leave.” Another trick: If you see a speck of soil that seems to be hanging off a leaf as if by magic, it’s likely attached via a spider mite string, which tends to be invisible.
Quarantine your plant. Even if you haven’t found any pests on your plant, quarantining it in a room with no other plants gives you a chance to double-check it and possibly prevent a full-on infestation. Cutsumpas recommends that owners of new plants quarantine them for at least a week and continue to be on the lookout for pests, but once you become adept at knowing what you’re looking for, you can reduce that stretch to three or four days.
If you’re fortunate enough to have an independently owned plant shop nearby, we recommend checking that out as a first option for your plant-buying needs. Ideally, you can establish a relationship with the proprietors or employees there, and they can help you make informed, enjoyable, and personalized purchasing decisions.
Great customer service isn’t the only reason to shop small, however. A plant that has spent some time living on the shelf of a plant shop has hopefully received attentive, hands-on care ever since it arrived from the nursery—and, just as important, has had time to adjust to your local climate.
“A plant that’s been in a similar environment to your home is going to be less likely to experience shock once it’s there,” Jane Perrone said. She added that commercial plant nurseries, where several online plant companies ship from, are typically much more brightly lit and kept at hotter temperatures than the average house or apartment.
As for big-box retailers such as Home Depot and Lowe’s, though they usually have hundreds of houseplants in stock at relatively low prices, in our personal experience we’ve found that those plants are often in shoddy condition.
This article was edited by Alexander Aciman and Catherine Kast.
Rose Maura Lorre is a senior staff writer on the discovery team at Wirecutter. Her byline has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Salon, Business Insider, HGTV Magazine, and many more. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, her daughter, one dog, two cats, and lots and lots of houseplants.
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