You don’t need no purifier! This startup helps you grow fresh air at home.

Photo credit: Yellow Green Farmers Market.

A white haze hangs outside the window of my third-story apartment in Delhi. It is smog, produced by all the firecrackers people burst on Diwali. The air has turned toxic.

A day after the festival of lights, smog had reduced visibility to 200 meters. Some of my family members have latched on to steroids to be able to breathe easy and several others are sneezing and coughing. I have fortified my home with an air purifier, but it has been glowing red, denoting unsafe levels of particulate matter. When I walk into my local pharmacy, the chemist is busy telling a customer they have run out of masks. Another customer is making enquiries about air purifiers. I want to tell him they won’t do much good now.

Smog in Delhi. Photo credit: Evan Lovely.

I have another plan up my sleeve though.

On a friend’s suggestion, I had recently watched a TED Talk episode pointing out how three plant varieties can produce the entire supply of fresh air needed by a home or an office. Now, more than ever, I want to lay my hands on them – without stepping into the dirty air outside.

Can Nurserylive – one of India’s largest online plant nurseries that stocks more than 6,000 units of plants, seeds, and garden accessories – help me?

I turn to the website and a burst of color greets me on the home page – pictures of flowers, bulbs, and even a potted lemon plant. I head for their Top 10 section, then to the subcategory of Best Air Filtering by NASA, and it is here that I find what I’m looking for.

Turns out, like me many other Indians have also been scouting for these online. For instance, the Sansevieria trifasciata Zeylanica, also known as ‘mother-in-law’s tongue’ or the ‘snake plant’, has been booked 778 times in the last 90 days. This section also has the money plant. The third variety, areca palm, is tucked away in the Top 10 Air Purifier section.

Areca palm which purifies air. Photo credit Osseous.

“We know that no single nursery or a couple of nurseries can hold 6,000 plants at one stock. Searching for a favorite plant is also a challenge. Therefore, we need to take the help of digital platforms and aggregation models,” Nandu Singh, co-founder of Nurserylive, tells Tech in Asia.

The Pune-based startup has processed over 61,000 orders to date. It sources from numerous nurseries in a city that still has a reputation for being green and enjoys salubrious weather.

Let a hundred flowers bloom

Roots online