Fronds With Benefits: How to nurture your plants (and get loved right back!)

Plants have personalities. It is known. (By plant people, at least.) Some generous and forgiving, others… fickle. (We’re not talking to you, nasturtiums.)

Of course, tricky-but-beautiful greenery is usually what my green fingers go grasping after when I’m looking to add to my growing indoor jungle. Who cares about practicality? It’s all about ‘my precioussss!’ And then I sulk when I can’t keep them alive.

However, there is hope for all us plant romantics, both aspiring and experienced. The friendly folks from The Plant Runner are experts at providing premium-quality, planet-friendly solutions that meet the varied needs of both indoor plants and their parents, from fertilisers and potting mixes to foliage care goodies designed to support long-term plant health.

They’ve come a long way from wandering around Melbourne/Naarm in their mobile plant shop (a converted old 1963 International Harvester Horse Float!), steadily growing to become a trusted name in plant care worldwide. Now, they’re evolving their already impressive offering to become a go-to hub for learning more about and nurturing our frondy friends. Knowledge is power, after all, and better understanding plant care is a win-win for creating a lush paradise in your lounge!

We had a chat with Dunc Hilder and Jimi Bright about why sustainability is important in the industry, creating ‘green’ rituals, and why nurturing your plants will nurture you right back.

The Plant Runner is a Melbourne/Naarm-based indoor plant care brand built around the idea that looking after plants should feel less confusing, more beautiful, and a whole lot more sustainable. We make premium plant care products, but just as importantly, we’re here to help people better understand what their plants actually need.

Our mission is to make plant care simpler, more thoughtful and more accessible – to replace guesswork with good information, and to help people feel more confident caring for the plants in their homes. At the heart of it, we want to help people grow healthier plants and build a better relationship with them over time.

It started with seeing how many people were bringing plants into their homes, but often without clear, practical guidance on what those plants actually needed to thrive. We felt there was room for a brand that could sit in that gap: one that offered genuinely effective products, but also education, encouragement and a more grounded approach to plant care.

We’ve always believed plants aren’t just decor – they’re living things sharing our spaces – and once you start seeing them that way, the whole relationship changes. Championing indoor plants, for us, has really meant championing better plant care: less guesswork, less waste, and more confidence in the process.

We’ve always believed plants aren’t just decor – they’re living things sharing our spaces – and once you start seeing them that way, the whole relationship changes.

People often assume plant care and sustainability naturally go together, but in practice it can be a bit more complicated than that. For us, it’s been about trying to make better choices where we can – from avoiding plastic across much of our range to using glass, even though that comes with its own challenges around shipping, weight and breakages.

We also think sustainability is tied to longevity. If someone understands how to care for a plant properly and keeps it going for years, that’s a much better outcome than treating it as something temporary.

So for us it’s really about making good products, packaging them as thoughtfully as we can, and helping people keep their plants healthy for the long haul.

One of the hardest parts is that the ‘right’ choice is often the harder one in practice. We’ve seen that with glass in particular. We’ve avoided plastic across a lot of our range because it matters to us, but glass is heavier to ship, more expensive to move around, and more prone to breakage. So that decision has flow-on effects everywhere – freight, packaging, margins, customer expectations, all of it. There have definitely been moments where the easier option was sitting right there.

Another part of it is just having to explain those choices clearly. Things like our commitment to 1% for the Planet are deeply important to us, but people won’t always know that unless we keep talking about it.

Really, it means accepting more cost, more breakages and more explaining – and deciding it still matters to us anyway. We’d still rather do that than take the easier path just because it’s easier.

We think sustainability is tied to longevity. If someone understands how to care for a plant properly and keeps it going for years, that’s a much better outcome than treating it as something temporary.

We feel like we’re in a bit of a new chapter with The Plant Runner. People have known us for the products for a long time, but lately we’ve been thinking just as much about the education side of it – how we can help people properly understand what their plants need, not just what to buy when something looks sad.

We’ve got quite a few new products slated for release, which is really exciting, but we’re also pretty mindful that we want the range to grow with a bit of purpose. We don’t want to just add more for the sake of it. We want it to feel connected, useful and genuinely helpful for plant people.

Alongside that, we’re building out more practical resources around the core parts of plant care with the aim of making the website a genuinely useful resource for people wanting to understand the method and care for their plants with more confidence. For us, that’s a really exciting part of where The Plant Runner is heading.

Yes – the whispering is true. The Plant Runner Method is a simple framework we’ve been developing to help people understand plant care in the right order. A lot of people jump straight to watering, fertilising, or buying something to fix the issue when a plant starts looking rough. But usually the better place to start is earlier than that. Light sets the pace for how a plant grows, how quickly it uses water, and how well it responds to care overall. From there, we look at water, then mix, then feed.

That’s the method: Light → Water → Mix → Feed.

It’s really about helping people work through plant care logically, instead of guessing or reacting to the first symptom they see. Over time, we want the website to become a useful resource for that – somewhere people can go to better understand what’s going on with their plants and how to care for them with more confidence.

I think a big part of the appeal is that plants give you something outside yourself to focus on. You start noticing things you might’ve otherwise missed – how quickly the mix is drying, whether the leaves are changing, whether the light in a room is working or not. It makes you pay attention in a different way.

There’s also the ritual side of it, but not in an overly romantic sense. It’s just the small stuff – watering, checking in, wiping leaves, moving things around, repotting when they need it. Those little jobs can be surprisingly calming. Plants obviously make a space look better, but I think caring for them can change the feel of a home too. It gives you a reason to slow down a bit, and I think a lot of people really need that.

Dunc: I’ve always had a soft spot for Monstera deliciosa. It’s probably my favourite because it’s one of those plants that manages to be both generous and impressive. It’s relatively forgiving, but when it’s happy, it really puts on a show. Watching the leaves get bigger and more fenestrated over time is still exciting, even after all these years. It’s become a classic for a reason. A great Monstera just brings a lot of life to a room.

I think caring for [plants] can change the feel of a home. It gives you a reason to slow down a bit, and I think a lot of people really need that.

1. Start with light.
   If you get the light wrong, everything else gets harder to read. It affects growth, watering, and how the plant responds in general.
2. Don’t water just because it feels like time.
   Check the mix first. A plant looking sad doesn’t always mean it needs water, and homes don’t dry out at the same pace year-round.
3. Don’t forget about the mix.
   Sometimes the problem isn’t your watering – it’s that the mix is too dense, staying wet too long, or just past its best.
4. Make one change at a time.
   When a plant starts looking unhappy, it’s easy to try a few different things at once. But changing one thing, then watching how the plant responds, usually makes it much easier to work out what’s helping.
5. Pay attention to the small clues.
   A lot of plant care gets easier once you start noticing the little things – how quickly the mix is drying, how the leaves are changing, or whether the plant is actually growing. Those small clues usually tell you a lot.

♡ This is a Better Together Peppermint Partnership, where we team up with brands we love. This story was created with support from our friends at The Plant Runner. What began as a mobile plant shop has grown into a trusted name in plant care worldwide. With their passion for nurturing plants and empowering plant lovers, The Plant Runner has evolved from selling plants to focus on providing expert plant care products used and loved by enthusiasts across the globe. Their mission is simple yet powerful: help you love your plants back.