PEOPLE - With Plant-Love from Bali, Thibault Charpentier.

Inspiring green thumbs through his verdant passion for plants.

“Plants are living things…you have a responsibility to care for them,” he said to me once at a dinner party, “and if you do, they care for you back.”

I had just bought a monster-sized monstera for APT La Fayette, and known for my big black thumb, I felt the weight of this man’s passion manifesting itself as slight perspiration on my upper lip. I was unsure, actually quite insecure about whether or not I would…no, could, keep this living thing, living.

Thibault Charpentier is well-known as @hebdomania on Instagram, a photographer by day, and moonlighting as @plantes_daddy, a passion project documenting the intricate beauty of plants. And this is where a monstera ceased to be simply a plant with leaves to me. Through his eyes, I began to appreciate the raspberry veins artfully bleeding to the edges of a caladium leaf; the accidental beauty of the variegated leaves (a strange “defect” where variations in the density of chlorophyll create white patterns on a leaf); and fragile new life unfurling before me as my plants birth new growth.

Photos by Thibault Charpentier

When I walked into his charming studio apartment in Paris (also moonlighting as a greenhouse) Thibault showed me all his plants, and where he had brought them back from. Where some of us bring keychains and mugs as souvenirs from our travels, Plantes Daddy brings back cuttings.

To Thibault, plants are marvels. He had always loved them, but it wasn’t until he spent time living in the rich, tropical climate of Bali, that he tried his hand at caring for his first plant cutting, nurturing it like The Little Prince and his rose. When it sprouted its first new leaf, there was an awe and amazement at nature itself unfolding in the palm of his own hands.

He noticed how easily the monstera grew wild along the valleys there in Bali, with a constant mist and moist soil and so began to understand how to care for them. Thibault explained to me that this is what these tropical plants naturally crave, and so, to try to replicate it with a good spray misting and a shower when it needs to be watered. Made perfect sense, understand the environments where the plant works best and try to replicate it.

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Photo by Thibault Charpentier

He eventually moved back to Paris, along with this cutting from Bali, and feeling a little displaced, he began to make himself feel at home in the best way he knew how: by filling his apartment with plants. He nurtured himself, he understood the environment where he worked best and to replicated it.

I also found it surprising that when I set out to make APT La Fayette feel like a home, I filled it with pillows and furniture, but it was precisely the moment that I filled it with plants, that it began feeling like home.

I think it’s exactly what he meant when he said that plants “care for you back.”