Black Thumb? These Tiny Intricate Paper Plants Will Never Die
Magazines, interior design blogs, and Pinterest make it seem like no interior space is complete without a veritable nursery’s worth of houseplants. The lush tropical foliage of popular plants like Monsteras, philodendrons, Pileas, fiddle leaf figs, and Areca palms is certainly beautiful, bringing color and a sense of vitality indoors, but not everyone has the time, dedication, and abundant natural light required to keep them alive longer than a few weeks.
In previous decades, fake plants made of silk or plastic offered a common solution to this problem, but most of them weren’t exactly convincing. Today, you can occasionally find some pretty authentic-looking artificial houseplants, but they aren’t cheap, and you’ll have to keep them dusted to preserve the effect. So why not do away with the pretense altogether and move in a different direction?
Artist Raya Sader Bujana lets you enjoy the looks of every single one of those trendy houseplants without requiring even the slightest bit of care. Her incredible miniature creations are made of paper and stand just a few inches tall. Each individual sculpture in her series “Tiny Big Paper House Plants” looks so uncannily real, you’ll wonder for a moment whether somebody actually managed to breed tiny versions of these snake plants, cacti, and more.
Even more incredibly, Bujana has crafted baskets and planters to go with each one. Look closely and you’ll see that many of them are woven just like their full-sized counterparts, some so intricately that they “almost took my sanity,” as the artist says on Instagram. That’s where you’ll find many detailed shots of her creations, which give us a sense of just how much work goes into each one.
“I’m dedicating an entire post to this basket, cause it nearly killed me,” she writes. “If you followed the process on my stories you saw how long it took me to weave this tiny thing, with a hundred gazillion paper threads that I hand cut. It was fun and nerve-wracking, but fun… I enjoy things that challenge both me and my patience. What do you guys think of this one? I think it’s my favorite basket to date…”
Luckily, you don’t have to be as talented as Bujana to enjoy these little masterpieces. The artist sells her creations on Etsy, so you can collect a miniature paper nursery of your very own. Unsurprisingly, you have to act fast when they’re posted, because they tend to sell out in a flash. Bujana’s paper plant crafting expertise has already netted her over 100K followers on Instagram, many of whom are waiting breathlessly for her next items to appear.
Bujana also crafts tiny cacti contained within miniature bell jar terrariums, wearable pressed paper flowers in glass lockets, life-sized paper flowers and ferns, paper food replicas, and additional non-paper items like enamel pins and framed prints.
Do these tiny paper plants make you want to start a collection that will never die?
