Putting a plant in your workspace is something a lot of people recommend. They say, it brings life to an erstwhile humdrum place, all while helping spark creativity, lowering stress levels, and stabilizing your mood. While a potted plant on the corner of the desk is usually what people have in mind, the Monitree offers something entirely different.
Designed to grow a plant around your monitor, it’s a tube-shaped terrarium that you can mount on the edges of your desktop display, ensuring you have a constant view of plants in the periphery while you spend the day staring at spreadsheets, emails, and code editors. No more glancing to the side to see the Lucky Bamboo growing at the planter on the desk – this thing keeps the greenery within the edges of your sight lines while you keep your eyes on the prize (and by prize, we mean, the work you have to finish for the day).
The Monitree is a plant terrarium made up of a 1.4-inch transparent tube that frames around the top and sides of your monitor, allowing you to border the electronic display on the center of your desk with attractive greenery. The tubes are adjustable, allowing you to extend or shorten them to fit any monitor 27 inches or under, although the whole thing will only fit flush on displays between 24 to 27 inches (it will have small gaps on the sides for anything smaller). If you’re using a small monitor, you can also opt to just mount tubes on the sides and skip the one on top, so the tube can sit flush against the monitor edges on either side.
It comes with soil and granular fertilizer that you can put at the bottom of each tube on the side, where you can plant any seedling you want to grow inside the terrarium. According to the outfit, it comes with two years’ worth of fertilizer included, so you don’t have to add any plant nutrition for a couple years.
The Monitree has built-in pores allowing the plants to breathe, while an included syringe lets you inject water through the pores any time the soil starts losing moisture level. Watering frequency will depend on the kind of plant you grow inside, although, the outfit claims, once a week as a rule should be fine. It also includes a full-spectrum LED that you can mount on any part of the tube, allowing you to provide the plants the proper lighting they need.
According to the outfit, you can technically grow any plant inside the tube. Of course, the size only makes it feasible for plants that actually grow small leaves and thin stems. It comes with a guide book that offers recommendations for plants to use in the terrarium and how to set them up, while a companion app allows you to upload a picture of your plant to get diagnosis and prescription, in case you’re having issues.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Monitree. You can reserve a full unit for pledges starting at $64.