Back to nature: this is a silent scream of the young

iLLUSTRATION: Glen Le Lievre

Watching the kids unpack recently was like watching a landscape unfurl. There were indoor plants, woven light fittings, linen sheets in colours of earth or ocean, macrame without irony, seagrass mats, wool throws, bamboo serving implements, resin jewellery … and I thought I ­spotted a hair shirt but it was a slub weave Uniqlo coat. Same, same.

Rubbing up against nature has never been more ubiquitous. Or expensive. As the Dulux people recently put it, 2021 is all about nourish, reset and retreat and that means reaching for ­biophilic hues, stormy blues and buff neutrals. If it’s white — and it often must be — it will be Natural White.

Reading the meta messages of décor isn’t confined to colour sheets. We can all do it, whether consciously or not.

The minimalism of a decade ago was home as suit. It was the residence of the city professional, too busy for clutter, too slick for sentiment. The brassy glitz of a few decades ago was the arrival of new wealth, an iteration of liberation and consumption. And this, this wilding of the inner-city pad, reads like a silent scream in green.

The indoor plants are the signature of this movement and these aren’t the dusty spider plants I potted in the 1970s and promptly forgot about.

These are strange exotica that would impress that new guy on Gardening Australia, who turned his apartment into a green house.

Monstera, devil’s ivy, dracaena, peace lily, bromeliad or the fiddle leaf fig, they crowd bathrooms, climb around kitchen windows and sometimes sit sullen, slowly being eaten by mites. There’s status too, not just in buying a 2m 80-year-old olive tree but keeping it alive in a west-facing city apartment.

The year of living at home fed the green revolution. If you can’t get into nature, bring nature into the home. If you can’t afford a backyard, bring the backyard in. If you can’t hug a tree, rub a leaf instead. Besides, you’re not going anywhere anytime soon so you may as well tend a garden.

The child substitute may play into this. One of the local nurseries — a sort of Uber of nurseries — calls its customers plant parents.

It offers instructions, emergency visits and fast replacements. The need to love and nurture in a time of crisis saw many people get dogs during lockdown. Those who didn’t get dogs got ­dracaena.

But the irresistible conclusion is that this is a silent scream of the young.

This is décor as declaration. It must be natural, free of chemicals, straight from the land, fair in its dealings and mindful of its repercussions. If climate change is reshaping their planet and their future, and if there’s little they can do to change that, then they can at least green their space, nurture nature in their own living room and make their fabrics organic, even if chemicals are filling the oceans and neutering wild life. They might not save the planet from their bedrooms of earth-coloured linens surrounded by Sea Spray walls but they’ll sleep easier.

This may be reading too much into a décor trend — the metallics of space chic might be just around the corner — but the last time we got enthusiastic about calico, seagrass mats, daisy yellow wallpaper, spider plants and macrame without irony was in the 70s. That too was a time of global anxiety, chemical clouds over the land and a propensity to pave paradise and put up parking lots. This time it feels more serious. This time it may last, at least, until space chic takes over.

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