Fifteen years ago, a guy walked into a plant café. Hilton Carter was a recent film school grad, a kid from Baltimore who knew he loved art but wasn’t sure what to do with the rest of his life. While working on a freelance film project in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, he stepped into Terrain, a garden-goods-and-coffee shop. As he rambled through the foliage, peace descended on him. He recognized plants from favorite memories: tropical fronds that reminded him of a visit to Costa Rica; greenery that transported him to his daily walks during graduate school in Los Angeles. “It was an energy that I just wanted to bottle up and bring home with me,” Carter says.
He began collecting plant knowledge wherever he went—during a stint living in New Orleans, he tended a fiddle-leaf fig tree and studied the indoor plant’s light needs. He learned about propagating, visited greenhouses, and became obsessed with nurturing and styling his own indoor garden. Around 2016, not long after he’d moved home to Baltimore and met his future wife, Carter began sharing photos of his plant collection on Instagram. His follower count exploded with new fans asking for tips. Book deals and Target product lines (planters, garden tools, home decor, houseplants) followed.
Through it all, Carter’s laid-back, neighborly approach has remained. In a full-circle moment, he recently designed and incorporated plants into a matcha café in Baltimore, the newly opened Equitea. You can often see him wearing a ball cap or a beanie, chatting like a friend, whether it’s with Craig Melvin on the Today show or to his social media followers about hanging staghorn ferns in the shower with sticky hooks. Last year, Carter’s sixth and most personal book yet, Unfurled: Designing a Living Home, came out, inviting readers in like houseguests, leading them room by room through the home he and his wife now share with two young daughters, and its indoor jungle of ferns of all kinds, monsteras, and spotted begonias. “Right when you step outside your door is the chaos you can’t control,” he says. “But the inside is yours. Why not make it a space where every single moment, every nook, every little spot that you have created for yourself can pull you back to something special?”
>> Get more inspiration from plant mavens making the most of every blossom:
The Flower Savant: Lucy Hunter
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