Houseplants are having their moment — and so is Ottawa’s House of Plants
Posted Oct 21, 2020 01:26:00 PM.
Many of us may remember this as the pandemic of plants.
We have been stuck inside, in stifled moods, and it's no surprise that houseplants and gardens have taken off. In Britain, The Guardian (with no less than the weight of the esteemed editorial board) declared them a “balm for troubled times.” The popularity of houseplants has exploded.
So it’s an OK time to be Judie Tu and to have recently opened House of Plants, an Ottawa store for houseplants.
Tu first opened the shop online in May, as a sort of natural outgrowth of a blog she had been keeping. The operation “transitioned from a blog, to carefully selling, to the online shop,” Tu says.
The transitions continue: over Thanksgiving weekend, Tu quietly opened the doors on a new shop in Nepean, located in a unit at the Augira Corporate Centre.
“I had to knock down two walls and build a new one,” Tu says. That space is now rich with greenery, filled with plants.
Over time, Tu has big plans for turning the shop into a space that can host workshops, art and a DIY space.
“It’s supposed to be like a design shop, that just happens to be built around plants,” she says. “It’s really supposed to emphasize the decor.”
October 2020 might not have been an auspicious time to open a retail store. There was no “grand” opening, says Tu, because only five people can enter the store at a time, and nobody wants to wait in line outside in the cold weather. The opening was quietly executed, but successful, Tu says.
She’s now getting to meet some of the people she had been selling plants to during the long months of the lockdown.
“I get to meet people I’ve been chatting with online since the beginning of the pandemic,” she says. “It’s nice to put faces to names.”
