Meet Summer Ryan Oaks, The Crazy Plant Lady Who Turned Her Brooklyn Apartment Into A Mini Jungle

Over the past several decades, there has been a growing concern over rapidly increasing activities f deforestation which has led to major environmental issues. While millions are being spent by governments and environmentalists across the world to raise awareness about the need to grow more and more trees, nothing much has been achieved on the ground level. Most people come up with a wide range of excuses including the non-availability of space and shortage of time to grow plants and take care of them. However, none of these excuses have prevented Summer Ryan Oakes, a young woman from New York City to do her bit and perhaps even much more for conserving the environment.

Famous by the name of Crazy Plant Lady, Summer Ryan Oakes is a model, author and environmentalists, who lives alone in her apartment in Brooklyn in New York. However, her apartment is quite different from any other apartment in her building or even in the entire New York City. This is because Ms. Oakes has about 500 plants from around 150 different species growing right inside her apartment. Her home gives the look and feel of a mini jungle located right in the heart of one of the most populated and polluted cities across the globe. There are countless different plants covering the walls, shelves, windowsills and almost every other space within the apartment.

According to Ms. Oakes, visiting her apartment for the first time is often a jawdrop moment for most people. From the moment they step into her queer little home, her friends and visitors alike get the feeling of walking through a small jungle. She even converted a closet to create space for a kitchen grow garden, which not only has regular herbs and spices, but also banana, sweet potato and pineapple plants. This jungle has been the result of the efforts put in by Ms. Oakes over the past six years in not only acquiring a staggering collection of indoor plants but nurturing them with extreme love and care.

Summer Ryan started her collection with a single fig plant that is currently placed in the workspace/bedroom of her apartment. Her monthly spending on her green friends is rarely more than $100 and it takes her all but half an hour to look after her plants every day. Apart from investing time and money in her ever growing collection of plants, Summer also tries to find the best ways to enhance their growth. In this respect she has started playing music, specifically classical music and heavy metal, at a slightly higher volume, after she learned that plants respond better to it. In her own words, “At the end of the day, they’re living, breathing creatures, who just don’t talk back.”

Summer Ryan plans to expand her plant empire into a community garden plot, besides which, she also hopes to inspire other people to start their own gardens and reap the various benefits offered by these gentle green co-habitants of our vast planet.