houseplants with big personalities, with rob moffitt of the haus plant
I CAN’T IMAGINE LIFE life without my admittedly oddball collection of houseplants, many of which have been with me for several decades already. So I was delighted recently to meet Rob Moffitt, whose Los Angeles-based botanical design studio (above) specializes in matching their clients with houseplants that are just the way I like them:
Not just pretty, but possessing loads of personality.
Often sculptural in stature, like living artworks.
Capable of forging a connection to the person caring for them … and with the potential to endure, maybe even for a lifetime of companionship.
In a recent conversation, Rob shared some favorites that you may wish to consider welcoming into your life, too, and where he finds them (hint: probably not at the big box store or supermarket). He also shared some of the tricks for how he shows them off to their best advantage.
Rob is a former nurse turned plantsman. He founded his business called The Haus Plant five years ago, at first as a plant truck that he’d take to farmers’ markets. The last two and a half years, The Haus Plant has resided in a permanent home on West 3rd Street in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles. He and his staff of 13 create designs to incorporate distinctive plants into clients’ homes and businesses, and provide plant-care services, too, for some of those customers.
Read along as you listen to the Dec. 1, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
distinctive houseplants, with rob moffitt
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Margaret Roach: It was so fun to talk to you to do the “New York Times” column that we did together recently, because our conversations around that—and almost like what is a houseplant and what does it all mean?—it really got me thinking about how important they are to me in my life. I mean, I’ve always known it, but it made me conscious, I guess. And so I kind of wanted to talk a little bit at the start here about what roles they play in our lives. Mine, yours, the customers’.
The most obvious one is beauty. And I guess that’s why people call you up and say, “Oh, I’d like to have you come and help me make my office or my home more beautiful.” But that’s not where it stops, is it?
Rob Moffitt: No, not at all. And that’s not where it really started for me. Plants for me started as a form of therapy. I started collecting plants as a hobby, and I was like you said, a nurse at UCLA, and on my days off—because as a nurse you’re working three days a week— I used to travel, and then I started gardening a little bit on my patio and then it turned into collecting plants and I killed a lot along the way. But that was part of the learning process, but it was really a form of therapy and sort of the ritual of caring for plants. And then it just sort of evolved, and I started working at a friend’s plant store and then after a while during the beginning of the pandemic, he was like, “You’re good at this. You should really consider doing your own thing.” So that’s what drove me to start The Haus Plant.
Margaret: Yes, and I think one of the things we talked about when we did the Times story is also that once you have houseplant in your residence, there’s also that connection to nature. And I’m in a cold-winter area where we don’t engage as much with the garden in certain of the winter months as we do the rest of the year, and so the houseplant is like that everyday connection, right?
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. We’re very lucky here in Southern California. I actually grew up in Wisconsin, which had some pretty cold winter. So when I moved out here as a travel nurse, initially I’d just be walking on the streets in Venice or West Hollywood and would see some of the incredible plant life. And that’s what kind of first piqued my interest is just the year-round opportunity to grow some really interesting things.
Margaret: And you do grow some really interesting things [laughter]. I think you used the quote in the Times story that some of them “are Dr. Seuss plants.”
Rob: Yes. I like my weird Dr. Seuss plants.
Margaret: Me, too; me, too. So how did that happen? And maybe we should say to people, what is a Dr. Seuss plant? I mean, I think the caudiciform plants, I don’t know if everyone will know what those are, but maybe you can tell us a little bit. Those are sort of the Dr. Seuss-iest of all, I think.
Rob: Yeah, I like a variety of different Dr. Seuss plants, but one of them, like you mentioned, is the caudiciform plants that have that water-storage fat trunk of a base. And I just find them so interesting. And over time as part of the caudex will form under the soil, so a lot of times when these plants have been in a grow pot for years, you can actually uplift their roots and expose more of that. And then over time you can shape them around rocks and different things like that. So you get some really interesting ones that are sort of found in the forgotten-about nurseries and different collectors. And I have fun playing around with all the different forms and shapes of them.
Margaret: So some of these ones, these fat plants, these caudiciform plants with this swollen caudex, this swollen base of the stem, let’s name a couple of those. I mean, I’ve had for 30-something years a shaving brush tree, which is I think from the Caribbean and Central America, Southern Mexico. Pseudobombax ellipticum is its name.
Rob: That’s one of my current favorites. I kind of go through cycles with which plants I like to use the most. And Pseudobombax are probably one of my favorites right now.
Margaret: So it’s not your average houseplant; it doesn’t look like a Pothos, right, you know what I mean? It’s not a little bunch of beautiful little colorful leaves spilling out of a pot or something. It has this crazy swollen thing, this storage organ that serves a purpose. But how would you describe it [laughter] to the customer? And do they all freak out when you first show them these things?
Rob: Yeah, I think one of the things I love about the showroom is just the interesting things that we have in there. Sometimes people just come to walk through the showroom to see kind of the things that we have, because we’re getting plants from collectors that have been collecting these for decades, and then they come into our collection and we’re pairing them with different vessels.
But back to your question about the Pseudobombax, a lot of them have this sort of really interesting green veining. I know you sent me a photo of yours. The base of it has this… It almost looks like a volleyball or like a tortoise shell kind of like Willy’s shell, our tortoise. [Below, Pseudobombax; photo by Gigi Aly.]
Margaret: And we should say, just to give him credit, Willy is—how old is he now? He’s 7?
Rob: Willy just turned 8. He’s an African Sulcata tortoise that we rescued from a rescue down in San Diego, and he lives at our showroom [laughter] and he’s become our little mascot.
Margaret: Or a big mascot as the case may be…
Rob: Our mascot, and about to be much bigger. So he’ll reach to be about 200 pounds someday.
Margaret: Oh boy. But these plants, the base of a Pseudobombax, for instance, it’s not smooth necessarily. It’s kind of craggy and mine has some green on it almost as if it photosynthesizes from the bark, so to speak; there are plants that have that characteristic. So people come in and they’re thinking maybe they want to work with you or whatever. I mean at first, do you think people are startled? Because I don’t even know what drew me to these kinds of plants in the first place, but they’re definitely unusual.
Rob: Yeah. I think the one thing that, one of my favorite things to do with these more interesting, strange plants, if you will, is kind of view them as their own piece. So a lot of times in a house or an interior, you’ll have a plant kind of shoved in the corner. I really like to make the plant front and center. So you can have this big beautiful room, and we do a lot of photo shoots and work with interior designers, and it’s one thing I love to do is these little tabletop pieces that can really take front-center stage in this photo of this gorgeous interior.
So kind of viewing plants as their own piece of art or object is kind of how I view it. You do anything from a small tabletop that’s in a small 12-inch low dish to 15-foot trees. So we do kind of everything in between. But one of my personal favorites is really working with some of these more small interesting plants to showcase their beauty.
Margaret: And you just said low dish, and that’s the other thing that is interesting. Looking at pictures on your website and the pictures that we did for the Times and so forth, you are daring in your juxtapositions of plant and pot. You don’t have a lot of things that look like a “flower pot,” you know what I mean—the traditional dimensions or whatever proportions.
Rob: Yeah. That’s one thing I really like to do is kind of show off more of the plant. And I think when you have this low dish, it sort of allows the plant to shine. You can’t really do that with every plant, but some of the caudiciform plants that we talked about, or these Pseudobombax, or Fockea edulis, it allows you to plant these in more of a shallow container. And that kind of gives a little bit more of breathing room for the plant to kind of shine, versus taking up a big typical flower pot on top of a tabletop, because proportion-wise it might be too tall. So kind of making the pot a part of the piece.
And we work with different local artists and ceramicists, and then we source a lot of vintage containers as well from different flea markets or antique shows and lots of estate sales as well. So always on the hunt for different interesting vessels to pair these plants with.
Margaret: And there are other sort of swollen-based plants, I think you use some baobab trees, Adansonia, and the Queensland bottle tree, I think that’s Australian, right, Brachychiton?
Rob: Brachychiton rupestris [above] is the one I like to use a lot. They always have a really interesting twisted trunk and a root system below the soil. And over time you’re able to expose more of the root, and especially I love when they’re potbound. So when one of these trees has been grown in a nursery pot for years, they’ll sort of start to twist on themselves. And then when you expose that, there’s all sorts of interesting things happening and you don’t really know—and that’s the beauty of it, too, is you don’t really know until you uproot some of these things and play around with it.
So I think one of my methods is play. [Laughter.] Having a small nursery—the back of our showroom is like a back-of-house nursery stock area where we just have a lot of plants that we just got in from collectors or growers. And a lot of it is just experimenting and playing and seeing what sorts of roots you find underneath the soil.
But the Queensland bottle tree is a really interesting one that you can play around with the root structure and twist it around a rock, or place multiples together to make a bigger arrangement. So I have a lot of fun with those ones for sure.
Margaret: And it’s not like what you’re talking about is you’re not taking a big plant out of its pot and trying to shove its roots around a rock and it’s done that day. This is a process, yes? This training is a process?
Rob: It’s a mix. Sometimes with the bottle trees, you are able to get a composition that looks really beautiful and finished as if it’s been trained for years and years. So sometimes I will do that. But again, it all kind of depends on what you’re finding underneath the soil with that specific plant.
But yeah, there’s others that I will do… I experiment a lot, too. So I’ll do something where I’ll pull up a bottle tree, wrap it around a rock, bury it back underneath the soil, and allow that root structure to attach itself around the rock. That takes more time. And then you also don’t really know what you’re getting a year or two later when you pull it back up, if it attached or if it grew around. Oftentimes with those I find really, really interesting things happen. And as you know, nature is going to do what it’s going to do, and we can be the artist or the guide to it, but it’s still going to have its own way of doing things.
Margaret: I would think the first time doing that, taking a plant out of the soil, looking at its roots and then saying, “Oh, I think I’m going to train it around a rock” and put it back in a pot, obviously, but trained over a rock, so it’s partly exposed, part of its root system is exposed and adding to the artfulness, the sculptural quality of it… It must be a little nervous-making though. I think you said you do that with, what are they, some of the rock figs [Ficus petiolaris, below, or Ficus palmeri] as well?
Rob: Yeah, some of the rock figs as well, when you manipulate their roots and expose them and then there’s different methods. You can put sphagnum moss around it and keep that damp and the roots will thicken. Or you can put it back in the soil and it’ll start to thicken a little bit slower.
Almost all the plants that we do this with will go into some type of initial shock, which can be alarming for customers, or for us. Sometimes we’ll have something planted out, and it looks beautiful in the moment, but I know because I just manipulated the roots and pruned back, it will go into some type of shock. So just being careful with how soon you’re letting something go out the door, just to make sure that it recovers quickly. When you’re manipulating that much root structure on a plant, sometimes they even die. I’ve killed a lot of plants, unfortunately, but they typically will go into some sort of initial shock period.
Margaret: And particularly because you’re in business and you want to minimize the mortality [laughter], but also for those of us who have something we love, the timing is important of when we’re going to uproot something and try, whether it’s just for reporting because we think it needs a larger space or whatever, freshening of the soil. And by the way, with the kinds of plants we’ve been talking about, I’m assuming we’re meaning almost like a cactus mix or something when we talk about soil. We’re talking about something fast-draining.
Rob: Yeah, very well-draining soil. And we’ll typically add a fair amount of perlite or pumice or a coconut coir just to help with the aeration of the soil. A lot of the containers that we use, we end up sealing, because they’re going on a very expensive table and we don’t want that to get ruined. So we really live by our moisture meter and finger checks with the soil to make sure that plants aren’t getting overwatered. But with that, you’re wanting to make sure that you have a really well-aerated soil.
Margaret: Right. So you’re testing with a moisture meter; when it doesn’t have drainage, you’re testing with a moisture meter regularly to give you a hint—it’s not the ultimate.
Rob: You can’t really trust them perfectly. But another thing we’ll do is put a wooden stake in there, and when you pull it out, you can kind of see a little bit further down if the soil is still damp, or finger checks and that sort of thing as well.
Margaret: If you were saying to people which plant to start with, so to speak, if they wanted to delve into, say, these plants with these swollen bases, these very naturally sculptural ones… And by the way, a lot of these are trees in their homelands, and they come from places that have a severe dry season usually, which is why they have that big swollen storage place, for what they need to get through the tough times. But you’re almost like bonsai-ing them.
Rob: Yeah. If you ever see the Australian bottleneck tree out in the wild, I mean, some of these trunks turn into these fat five-, six-foot round diameter trunks, and they can be short fat little trees. Like at The Huntington gardens, where I first got really interested in some of these plants, you can see some of them there that are just wild, just how big they get. And what we do is take them at a younger age, or some of them are much older, but they’ve been contained to this nursery pot, so it’s almost like self-bonsai a little bit. So it keeps them contained. It’ll start to fatten the trunk or the base. So yeah, I guess what we’re doing is a form of bonsai, definitely not your traditional bonsai, but I guess, I don’t know if I would call it bonsai or not, but we’re manipulating plants, so I think it’s some form of it.
Margaret: Yeah, no, I just meant it in terms of, it’s almost like the process if with a very different plant palette. And even though I’ve had, as I mentioned, the shaving brush tree for so many decades, I’m embarrassed to admit I never even realized I could prune it. I’m the only person I knew who had this plant. I bought it at the Philadelphia Flower Show in the vendor area a million years ago, and I brought it home and I didn’t know anything. And it’s not like there’s a handbook that has all this in it, especially not 30-something years ago. And so you also, besides playing with maybe exposing some roots of some of these plants, you also do some adjustments to the tops of them?
Rob: We heavily prune plants, and I think that allows it to open different canopies. And also depending on what space you’re putting it in, you may have it on a coffee table where you want to be able to see through it, so we’ll open up the canopy a little bit. But yeah, we will prune back plants quite a bit. Best to do that and late spring, early summer, and that way it allows the tree to kind of, as it’s entering its growth phase, to pop back pretty quick.
Margaret: We’re not going to do this when they’re dormant because a lot of these plants do go dormant; again, a lot of these caudiciform plants do go dormant. They come from places where they’re accustomed to having a dry season. And so similarly with the repotting, you don’t just do it any old time, right? You time that carefully, too, don’t you?
Rob: Some of them are more forgiving than others, but it will just kind of affect the timeframe in which they’ll come back. So a lot of the rock figs, at least here in Southern California, they’ll hang onto their foliage most of the year. They definitely thin out in the fall and winter, but especially if we have one indoors with next to a window with really good light, I think a lot of it has to do with the temperature changes. So a lot of those, even the Pseudobombax—I have a couple clients that have a really beautiful Pseudobombax, and it’s in a southern-facing window and typically outside all of mine will lose all their foliage, which I imagine yours probably does, too.
Margaret: Mine does. It hasn’t gone to sleep this year, and I don’t know why yet, but it typically would by around now, and it stays asleep for many months. And I don’t even water it at all during those months because I’m a terrible person. But it seems to have been fine with that.
Rob: You’ve had it for, what, 30 years you said?
Margaret: Thirty, 35 years, yeah.
Rob: Amazing.
Margaret: And I haven’t repotted it in at least 25 of those years.
Rob: Oh, incredible. Yeah. A lot of the plants I like to work with thankfully are pretty forgiving. I think some of the tropicals that are a little bit heavier fertilizer feeders, you do like rule of thumb for houseplants, which is potting every two to three years. But some of the Fockea, the Pseudobombax that we’ve been talking about, those are quite forgiving in many different ways as long as they’re not getting waterlogged.
I think that’s the main thing that people do is love their plants a little too much. They see maybe some leaves start to yellow—especially on some of these more deciduous plants that have a rest period—they see yellowing leaves or drooping leaves, and they just go, “Water more,” because that’s what we know to do with them. And that’s usually what ends up killing the plants, in my experience.
Margaret: I agree. I wanted to ask you about—I sort of hinted in the introduction—it’s easy to find houseplants, they’re everywhere. They’re even in the supermarket [laughter]. But some of these not so much. So like I said, I bought mine years ago at the vendor area of a flower show; specialty places. Is there trade in these—legal and conscientious trade, I mean—how do you find them? I mean, where do you look for unusual houseplants like you like to adopt?
Rob: Yeah, it started with going to a lot of the nurseries that I knew, and then just kind of plant people. And usually even these people that have nurseries that are selling more commercially to office buildings and just your typical houseplants, a lot of these people also have areas in the back that have things that they’ve come across or collected over years that they’re willing to give up. Sometimes that’s also where you find the plants that are not for sale, which I’m always after [laughter].
Margaret: So the ones that have almost been forgotten about, that have been put in the back and they don’t want to throw them away, but they’re not really… They don’t feel that they show well out in the front on the shelf with the other stuff.
Rob: And that’s the thing: I find that some of those are the most beautiful. They have interesting shapes, and they don’t necessarily have to be a “rare plant.” They can sometimes just be overgrown and have interesting form for them to be. And I think sometimes they just need that pruning, or to be paired with the right container, to show off what they really can be. But yeah, we’re always on the hunt for interesting plants, especially here in Southern California and we’re next to Arizona where there’s some interesting growers, where I’m at some of those trade shows, like the one that you were at, and meeting the vendors and then talking to them about what I’m looking for, what I like to do. And they’re like, “Oh, I have this collection, or I know this person.” So it’s all about relationships, too, it’s just getting to know some of these different collectors and growers who are showing plants at some of the inner-city shows and things like that. [Above, a Dioscorea elephantipes vining caudiciform plant.]
Margaret: Probably estate sales, even sometimes yard sales sometimes. And Facebook Marketplace, have you done that? Do you do that?
Rob: We are on Facebook Marketplace every day. We’re at estate sales. I’ve developed relationships with estate-sale managers, so some of them will let me know first because plants aren’t probably the main thing that they’re trying to sell at these estate sales. They’re sort of an afterthought.
So I have developed relationships where I get to run into these estate sales before they open. Sometimes I’m finding great containers, but a lot of the times what I’m looking for is the plants.
There’s interesting estates up in Beverly Hills. I was at one last year where I just found a bunch of incredible plants that were just in these terracotta pots and just offered to take all of them. So I’m always finding stuff like that.
Actually today, one of my designers, he’s down with our truck in San Diego, and he has about 15 different nurseries that he’s going to. And he’s been sending me photos yesterday and today of things that he’s finding. So between myself and my three designers, we’re always on the hunt: different markets and estate sales and Facebook Marketplace. So we’re always on there. And it’s funny, a lot of times he’ll send me a listing on Facebook Marketplace and I’m like, “Yep, I already saw it. I already put an offer in.” It’s like a little bit of a treasure hunt. We have a lot of fun with it.
Margaret: Yeah. Well, I’m so glad to talk to you, Rob Moffitt from The Haus Plant in Los Angeles. You remind me, the way you’re talking just then, reminds me of a friend of mine who has an antique store and he goes “junking,” as he calls it, you know what I mean? And he’s like just scouring places, scouting, and he has all his special sources. So it’s kind of fun to think about that. And next time I go to my favorite nursery, I’m definitely going to ask the owner if they’ve got some stuff stashed in the back that’s a little overlooked, and maybe I can adopt somebody with personality [laughter].
Rob: You’ll have to let me know when you find some interesting things.
(All photos from The Haus Plant, except as noted.)
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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 16th year in March 2025. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Dec. 1, 2025 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
