Recruiting / Posting jobs
I started working at twenty-four. I am well past that now, and Plantaeroot came to me late — in the years when I was expected to slow down rather than begin something.
I grew up with things I did not think to value at the time. The smell of the ground after the first rain. Breeze on a summer evening. Dew sitting on leaves before the day got going. These were not experiences anyone arranged. They were simply there, every year, for anyone standing outside.
What made me start this was watching that disappear. Young people today live indoors in a way my generation did not — air conditioning, concrete, a screen holding their attention. I have met plenty who have never heard the word petrichor. That is not their fault. Nobody handed it to them.
I could not do anything about that at scale. What I could do was make it easy for someone in a flat, with no garden and no idea where to begin, to keep one plant alive. So in 2014 I began Plantaeroot from Rishra, in Hooghly.
I wanted it to be more than a shop. Anyone can list plants for sale. The harder part is telling a customer honestly that the plant they have chosen will not do well in the light they have, and suggesting a different one — even when the first plant costs more. We have done that many times, and I would rather lose that sale than have a plant die in someone's house and put them off gardening for years.
So we stock widely. Indoor varieties for dark rooms, flowering plants for each season, fruit and spice plants for balconies, medicinal varieties, succulents for people who forget to water, and the pots, tools and fertilisers that go with them. We pack carefully, because a plant that arrives broken is a plant nobody trusts. And we answer questions after delivery, because that is when the real problems start.
I do not think a single plant on a windowsill fixes anything large. But I have seen what it does to a room, and to the person who looks after it. A little more calm. A little more attention paid to something living. That is worth building a business around.
If you have never kept a plant, start with one. Write to us and we will help you choose it.
— Basudev Saha, Founder, Plantaeroot
