coffee, tea or fig leaf?

In this unique cafe, coffee and scones are served up with a side of Swiss cheese plant, plus a smorgasbord of potted treasures that would whet any houseplant lover’s appetite.

Word has filtered through of a very cool cafe in a gritty little dead-end street in Addington on the edge of Christchurch’s CBD. It is a divine little place brimming with plants, resulting in a verdant bohemian vibe. Little Merchants is very much the product of an obsession with pot plants by its owner Regina Shin. The artist and former furniture and interior designer has owned the commercial office building in which the cafe is housed for six years.

After falling in love with a large Monstera deliciosa she had bought for the office suites’ communal area, other pot plants followed, softening and bringing life to the building’s interior and pleasure to all its inhabitants. “I started getting pot plants one by one,” Regina explains. But before long hundreds were inhabiting her 19th century cottage in Merivale, obtained from every and anywhere – online, garden centres, supermarkets.

Then about a year ago, the tenant leasing the cafe at the base of the block left, and Regina, wanting to keep it open for the office workers at the very least, found herself with a new job.

Running a cafe meant, however, that she was away from home for up to 13 hours a day. She felt she wasn’t giving her beloved pot plants the attention they deserved.

So, she took them to work with her (as you do). And, with the diminutive cafe never going to have room to house them all, the only solution was to build an extension just for them – and a few more tables for delighted customers.

Now a vast and varied collection of plants inhabits the new space. They hang from bespoke metal racks suspended from the ceiling, beneath skylights. They fill and spill from window tops and sills, diffusing the sunlight into a golden hue, dappling the concrete floor. They climb and drape, swoop and shoot from shelves, high and low. They line the walls, crowding around the old washhouse tubs plumbed in for ready access to water. They cluster in corners and tower high.

There are weeping figs, fiddle-leaf figs, monstera regular and mini (Philodendron minima); there’re strings of hearts and pearls; angel’s wing and mother-in-law’s tongues, monkey masks and foxtail ferns, calatheas and caladiums with their fabulously coloured and patterned leaves, filmy ferns, hoyas, palms… really, you name it and chances are it is thriving somewhere in this glorious, luxuriant jungle.

“I love them all,” says Regina. “Each has a different character yet all love the same conditions. Well, some

They hang from bespoke metal racks suspended from the ceiling, beneath skylights. They fill and spill from window tops and sills, diffusing the sunlight into a gold hue, dappling the concrete floor.