Joe Bagley, a 20-year-old self-confessed “jungle boy”, has turned his one-bedroom apartment in Loughborough, UK, into an indoor jungle with over 1,400 potted plants.
From cacti and succulents to tropical flowers and vines, you can find all sorts of plants growing in Joe Bagley’s home. They are everywhere, on the dining table, on bookshelves, even in the bathroom, pretty much wherever there is any spare space that hasn’t been occupied by something else. There isn’t that much space available, s cramming 1,400 potted plants into it has made it look like a sort of indoor urban jungle. As you can imagine, looking after so many houseplants takes a bit of time, and Joe admits that he spends most of his free time watering them and making sure they are healthy.
Photo: UK Houseplants/Facebook
“I love it every morning when I wake up and walk around, it’s lovely. There’s not a single room without plants in and every room is chockablock,” the 20-year-old houseplant enthusiast said. “There’s plants on the stairs, dinner table, my bedside cabinet. I’m always thinking of new places to put more. I have some plants in here and I don’t know where they came from. I can’t remember buying them. It’s like I have an addiction.”
Joe’s fascination with houseplants started when he was 13, after his grandmother, who lives right across the street, gifted him a cutting of her spider plant. As the South African plant grew and blossomed, so did his obsession with houseplants, and his life these days basically revolves around them. He works in a garden center, spends his free time either caring for his plants or reading article and studies about them, and claims to have developed a kind of “sixth sense” when it comes to taking care of them.
“I have a sixth sense for knowing when something needs watering. I can just be walking past a plant and I know,” he said. “I have even been known to wake up at 1am and think ‘Hang on, one of my orchids needs watering’.”
His obsession with houseplants really blew up when he moved out of his parents’ house in August 2018. He had about 100 plants at the time, but getting his own space inspired him to quickly grow his collection to over 1,000. He now resorts to smuggling new plants into the house in the middle of the night, because his grandma, who lives right across from him, is always telling him that he already has too many.
Through the last seven years, Joe Bagley has accumulated a wealth of plant knowledge, and he recently launched his own website, where he publishes all sorts of helpful information for fellow plant enthusiasts, but also answers their questions about plant care. His dream is to one day open his own plant-filled “jungle cafe”, which he describes as his ideal business.
Joe isn’t the only houseplant enthusiast we’ve featured on OC. back in 2016, we wrote about Summer Rayne Oakes, a fashion model who had turned her Brooklyn apartment into her very own indoor jungle.
