The Top 9 Gardening Trends of 2025

Interest in low-maintenance plants, like succulents, grows, yet consumers increasingly opt for faux plants as even easier alternatives

For consumers who want a low commitment pet of sorts, plants benefit from the same dynamic as easy-bake ovens and sous vide machines—they require just enough effort that it feels like an accomplishment, but not so much that it’s a chore.

But some consumers even find live plants to be too much work: discussion, searches, and sales of faux plants are in many cases growing faster than for live plants. And Whole Foods, which sells plants, dedicates a page on their site to teaching customers “How to Not Kill Your Succulent”. It’s a strong indicator of the changing dynamics given that succulents are among the easiest plants to keep alive.

Vertical indoor gardening thrives alongside increasing urbanization and smaller living areas

Indoor hydroponic systems like those from Gardyn are on the rise as indoor gardening thrives amid growing urbanization and smaller living spaces, two growing home & living trends. Apartment dwellers use these low-maintenance, high-tech vertical growing studios to maximize their greenery inside and feel a sense of self-sufficiency amidst the concrete jungle.

Plant photo identification apps are increasingly used to check the species of plants – just as “shazam” is used to identify songs

Google built a two-trillion-dollar monopoly by finding a good way to map keywords to web pages. But as the company has grown, the definition of search has broadened from the keywords-and-pages model, to encompass any question that can have an answer. And this has led other companies to get into different aspects of the answers business, where they can hope to challenge Google, like Amazon's Alexa.

When it comes to auditory inputs, Shazam, now owned by Apple, lets people identify songs by recording snippets of them. And when it comes to visual inputs, Google itself has Google Lens, which identifies objects in photos and can translate text in images. PictureThis is a niche solution in this space: the app lets consumers identify plants, and diagnose issues from just a single photo.

Every search product changes the way we respond to questions. Since the introduction of the first dictionaries, we've gotten increasingly used to the idea that answers are readily available to us—which makes these products more powerful than they look, because once answers are convenient to access, people are much more willing to ask questions. A good search product doesn't just capture the market, but rapidly expands it.

From a business standpoint, some of the most interesting use cases for image-based search revolve around potential purchases—searching for clothes based on an image rather than a text description would be a hugely lucrative sales channel for a company like Google.

And today’s lack of a perfect solution is clear when looking at Reddit’s sprawling subreddits, What's This Plant (649k members) and FindFashion (315k members). These end up being a workaround for searching for images directly, and they don’t capture much revenue because the results are provided by volunteers and there isn’t a good model for capturing and channeling the demand, compared to something like search ads. These communities are also a testament to the unsatisfied demand for better reverse image search: getting an answer is better than not getting one, but getting an instant answer is even more appealing.