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Jakarta houseplant expo returns from pandemic slumber
Jakarta's annual Flona Festival has been revived after the COVID-19 pandemic stopped crowd-pulling events in their tracks. However, with mobility curbs lifted, the festival looks to benefit from the houseplant boom.
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Visitors descend on the annual Flona Festival in Lapangan Banteng Park, Central Jakarta on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2022. The expo has finally returned after two years of pandemic curbs in the capital, and is looking to benefit from the ongoing houseplant boom. (JP/Fikri Harish)
After a two-year absence, Jakarta’s annual Flona Festival officially returns to its longtime home at the Lapangan Banteng Park, Central Jakarta. While the houseplant craze that bloomed over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic has slightly cooled down, demand is still relatively high according to the nurseries.
This year’s Flona Festival, organized by the Jakarta Park and Forest Agency, is attended by more than a hundred plant nurseries and pet shops, with some hailing from outside the city. While ornamental house plants make up the majority of the products on display, there is plenty more here than just aglaonemas, orchids and bonsais.
If you are looking to give the farm-to-table life a go, one of the booths here specializes in varieties of thyme, oregano and other herbs a well-stocked kitchen might need. Others, like that of the Jakarta Grape Community, focus more on fruits and other edible vegetation.
For the budding plantsmen and women, there are also several succulents and cacti booths to get you started. Known for being relatively low maintenance, these fleshy and thorny plants are a favorite among newer enthusiasts that caught the plant bug over the pandemic.
Rahman, who has been working with the Lembang, West Java-based succulent-nursery Cactus Family since 2018, witnessed firsthand this skyrocketing demand.
“In the early days of the pandemic, we from the cactus and succulent industry had never seen that kind of demand since 1992 [when Cactus Family started operating],” explained Rahman at the festival on Tuesday. While they would usually only sell cacti at least over 6 months old, Rahman had to resort to selling younger plants, even as young as weeks old, to satisfy demand.
Even now that people are heading back to their offices and schools, the succulent nursery is still selling around 35,000 plants on a monthly basis, lower than their peak pandemic numbers but still considerably higher than the 20,000 sales peak they reached before the pandemic.
