About Rare Leafy

Rare Leafy is the kind of small editorial that doesn’t try to be everywhere. We write quietly, on a slow schedule, about the houseplants we actually grow in our apartment.

How this site started

Rare Leafy began as a notebook beside a north-facing window in late autumn, 2019. The first plant I wrote about was a Philodendron gloriosum that had just put out its third terrible leaf in a row, yellow-edged, soft, embarrassingly cupped. I was certain I was killing it. I started keeping detailed notes because nothing on the internet seemed to describe exactly what I was seeing.

Three years later, that gloriosum is still alive, a bit slower than I’d like, but unbothered. The notebook turned into a series of long emails to a friend who also kept plants. The emails turned into early blog drafts. And eventually, that quiet, repetitive habit of paying attention turned into the site you’re reading now.

What we write about

We focus on a particular slice of the plant world: the rare, the difficult, the patterned, the slow. Our six standing sections are:

• Rare Aroids: anthuriums, philodendrons, monstera varieties, and other patterned-leaf collectors’ plants.
• Tropical Foliage: calatheas, alocasias, colocasias, and the dramatic foliage we keep failing and re-failing to grow correctly.
• Collector Care: grow lights, moss poles, humidity cabinets, substrates, fertilizer routines.
• Plant Problems: the troubleshooting library: yellow leaves, edema, root rot, pests, fungus, transplant shock.
• Indoor Plant Styling: shelves, light, decorative pots, and the calm aesthetic of plants living inside a real home.
• Slow Plant Living: plant journaling, seasonal rituals, mindful indoor hobbies.

What we will never do

We will not recommend a plant we haven’t grown. We will not write a care guide based on what other care guides say. We will not pretend a plant is “easy” when it isn’t, or “rare” when it isn’t. Language matters, especially in a hobby that often runs on hype.

We will also never run sponsored content disguised as editorial. If we feature a brand or a tool, it’s because we personally use it. If something turns out to be bad, we’ll say so plainly.

About the editor

Rare Leafy is written and edited by Piyush Bhatia, plant collector and slow hobbyist. He keeps a modest apartment collection of rare aroids, tropical foliage, and the calatheas that refuse to behave. Most of the plants have at least one imperfect leaf, which he takes as proof they are real.

He has been growing houseplants seriously for years. The plants he writes about now are the ones that survived his learning curve, and the experiments he runs on his own windowsills are documented here.

The slow pace, on purpose

You won’t see fifty posts a month here. Most articles take days to research, longer to write, and even longer to photograph properly. We publish when we have something genuinely worth saying, and then we leave it alone.

If that pace works for you, welcome. We’re glad you found the site.

Have a question, correction, or just want to say hello? Send us a message.