SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: I think my friends and
strangers alike, like they come into my house and they don’t even say anything at first,
it’s just kind of like the jaw drop.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: Hey there. Welcome to my apartment.
COMM: This is Summer - an environmentalist,
model and author, who has over 500 plants in her Brooklyn apartment.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: So, when people come into
the house, I like this element of feeling like they are walking through a forest. My
friends would always get like whacked in the face with the branch, but I was like, ‘That’s
the point, you’re like walking through the forest.’
COMM: Over the past six years she has amassed
a staggering collection of indoor plants.
INTERVIEWER: So how many different types of
plants? SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: I would say that this
is a borderline obsession.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: So this is my kitchen
space and I love it because I love the green on the walls and the green plants. This is
kind of a cool plant. It’s called the toothache plant and if you eat this, it’s kind of
like getting a shot of Novacane with a little Sichuan pepper involved. My mom and dad named
me like Summer Rayne, like a lot of people ask me if that’s my real name. My dad always
jokes like, ‘You could have become a porn star or an environmentalist.’
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: And that’s my couch.
Just like a little, just like a little place to kind of just come and sit and rest and relax.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: So this is the place where I kind of like work/sleep.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: This is the first plant
that started it all. This is my fiddly fig. I grew up in the country, so it was so natural
for me to have like plants in my life. In fact like, I think it’s so unnatural not
to have plants. In August, I converted this from a closet to a kitchen grow garden. So
I have everything from like lemon scented geranium to broadleaf thyme, taro root, Cuban
sage, bananas, have some pineapples, we have some micro greens, this is peppercorn. That’s
a sweet potato, this is actually what the little slip of the sweet potato will eventually
grow into, and you can actually even see the sweet potato starting to pop out of the soil,
so that will probably be ready for picking in about a month’s time which is totally cool.
COMM: Summer typically spends around $100
a month on plants and 30 minutes a day taking care of them.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: It’s hard to walk into
a plant shop without wanting to buy a plant. It’s tough.
MADELINE SACHS: Yeah, she is in here all the time. She is always buying plants or pots or dirt.
COMM: And it’s not just money and time that
she invests in her evergrowing collection.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: This is kind of like whacky,
but I started to read one of these books and it talked about like plants and music. And
wouldn’t you know that plants do have a preference for different kinds of music? And I thought
that was like pretty cool, so they prefer Vedic chants.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: And then it goes into classical music.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: Then it goes into rock music.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: And then it goes into heavy metal.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: And then it goes into
no music. So I thought like, ‘Wow, super trippy,’ but then at the end of the day,
like they’re living breathing creatures and, you know, what’s great about them is
they don’t like, talk back. Now that I found out that plants enjoy the music too then I
do play it a little bit louder than before.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: I don’t really talk
to my plants and in that kind of way, although sometimes. Yeah, sometimes I’ll pass by
and I’ll like touch a leaf. There’ll definitely be like kind of loving energy.
COMM: And Summer plans to carry on expanding
her plant empire into the future.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: So how I’d like to carry
this on in the future would probably be getting a plot of land in a community garden, continuing
gardening and inspiring others to get their garden on.
SUMMER RAYNE OAKES: I mean I think the new
cat lady is the plant lady. I’m gonna be like crazy plant lady when I get older. I’m
already the crazy plant lady.