A young man’s love of house plants has grown into a flourishing business during lockdown, with blooms being sent out across England and beyond.

View this post on Instagram

Some of my favourite photos of the gorgeous stock we had delivered yesterday check out our story for the whole lot! What's your favourite? These will be online very soon, keep an eye on our socials for when it's online as some of the plants are very limited availability and as always very competitive prices #plants #plantsofinstagram #plantsforsale #houseplant #calathea #stringofhearts #spiderplant #fishbonecactus #devilsivy #jatrophamultifida #monkeyjars #philodendronbirkin #rhipsalis #indoorjungle #indoorjunglebloggers #urbanjungle #urbanjunglebloggers #plantsmakepeoplehappy #plantsplantsplants #plantstand #plantlover #plantlove #houseplantclub #plantlife #houseofplantlovers #house_plant_community #houseplantopia #houseplantcommunity

A post shared by Plant Hunt (@planthuntuk) on

Ali Hunt launched Plant Hunt in lockdown having discovered the benefits of green-fingers during the pandemic.

He said: “I’d read about the benefits of house plants for anxiety and mindfulness and I found it really helped me. My dad is an entrepreneur and I always wanted to give it a go myself so just decided to give it a go at selling plants myself.

“I threw myself into learning everything I could about plants from how to source them to taking care of them. For the first few weeks it was a bit slow but then I did an £100 Instagram giveaway which blew up, and suddenly I had orders coming in from Scotland, the Shetland Islands, Newcastle – all over the country. That one post has more than 11,0000 likes and 4,000 comments and it hasn’t really slowed down since.”

MORE: ‘They were on the edge already’: Business preventing homelessness on pandemic blow

Mr Hunt is buying his plants from a wholesaler in the Netherlands and storing them in his parent’s conservatory in Eaton until they are sent out.

“I wanted to make sure I work with a really good supplier. I’ve been to Amsterdam a couple of times and on one occasion had a really long chat with a man who ran a plant shop out there. Looking back I think some of the things he told me was what began all of this,” he said.

Mr Hunt said his most popular plant is the Monstera minima, which looks like a cross between a cheese plant and a fern.

He said: “Cheese plants are also really popular but that’s to be expected. It’s been so interesting to have a business which is so driven by instagram. I put up a picture of a plant and it pretty much sells out. I also get flurries of orders from where the algorithms have picked up my page – I had a load in Scotland then in Midlands, but none of them knew each other.”

He added that he would like to start growing his own plant stock from seeds and propagating his own plants.

“It’s something I’m working on – I’d especially like to breed some rarer plants but that might take a while,” he said.