About Us
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We are a family plant nursery which is registered at the phytosanitary department of Austria.
We only ship well cared, controlled and healthy plants with individual plant passports.
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A jungle in the heart of Vienna .
Away from gardens or fields, we are very fortunate to be able to call a piece of nature our own.
What started as a hobby quickly took hold and not only our plants, but also our collection grew rapidly.
In our indoor forest you will mainly find rarities of the plant world, which we carefully cultivate, breed and multiply.
Although we are working in an urban environment, we strive to stay as natural as possible. Unless in rare emergencies, we always prefer organic fertilizers and pest control methods.
You have our guarantee that all plants received from us are healthy, well nurtured and pest free. We also exercise extreme caution in packing in order to minimize potential damages in shipping and handling. Please understand that we won’t ship under extreme conditions.
We are looking forward to bring a piece of nature also into your home!
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Our nature has always been incredibly impressive to me.
As a child, I often wandered through the forest for hours with my grandparents, looking for “mushrooms”, or sometimes just like that.
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Especially when looking for mushrooms, and perhaps also because of my low overall height at that time, I was fascinated not only by the wooden giants but also by the smallest parts of this magical place. Germinating seeds, mosses, the symbiosis between flora, fauna, fungi, and everything else you can find there. A microcosm on a small piece of the earth under my feet.
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Over time, I began to understand more about the processes taking place in ecosystems, did my own research, and sought help from people who knew more, wherever I could find it.
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But even if a lot of things now seemed explainable to me, in my eyes nature never lost its magical aspect.
I felt the same way with music. And even if I could never explain the connection, music created the same inexplicable feeling for me that I experience when walking into a forest.
This was one of the reasons to find myself in a new field and to do extensive research on this. One of the first and still baffling studies I dived into was the effect of music on plants and their growth. There are now quite a few "studies" on this topic online, unfortunately often with a more esoteric touch than scientifically founded. But some serious publications can also be found, very interesting and informative. I definitely want to do my own research on this topic in the future.
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I also came across the incredible knowledge of Monica Gagliano.
In one of her experiments, she used sound sources to manipulate the direction of the root growth of plants. In addition, she was able to prove that plants also send sound waves above ground, but in a spectrum that is no longer audible to humans.
Is there anything to the myths of the antique in which music was used to beguile plants? Perhaps the excerpt from the Harry Potter films which are about the "Mandrake Roots" is not that far-fetched.
In order to understand Gagliano's attempts not only on the sound level, I saw it as necessary to learn more about the physiology of our plant world. So I came across other experiments by the scientist just mentioned, which amazed me once more. In one of those experiments, mimosas were used to demonstrate that plants have “memories”.
[A mimosa in a pot was stimulated every day to fall about three feet. After the first reaction, as expected, were the typical hanging leaves - over time an "understanding" on the part of the plant was built up that this process is not harmful. Thus, the leaves have stopped responding as usual to the external stimulus. It is noteworthy that even after 1 month without this irritation, the plant still had no hanging leaves when it fell again.]
The hours in which I lost myself in the various studies and researches have definitely shaped and changed my view of our plant world. But the magic is still there.
The affection for unusual, variegated plants came by chance.
Some time ago I bought a Pink Princess together with my wife, the color pattern of which fascinated me so much that other "special" plants quickly followed. It reminds me a little of the time when I collected “Magic Cards” as a child, only that today they need a little more care, but also reward you with their growth.
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With Kern Plants, I found the opportunity to turn another of my hobbies into a job and to be able to research more extensively in our world of plants.
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When I was nine, I planted a seed for the first time in my life. With the help of my grandfather, I dug a little divot in the soil, pressed the seed firmly into the ground, and covered it up with fresh soil. I can still remember the moment exactly. It was a mimosa seed.
Over time, this tiny seed began to germinate, sprout, bloom, and produce more seeds. This magical process cast a spell over my nine-year-old self and showed me the greatest wonder of nature: the potential of a single inconspicuous seed.​
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My grandfather came from the small town of Hamgyeongbuk-do in North Korea. More than 70 years ago, he followed his parents and younger brother across the Dooman River to the Korean Autonomous Prefecture of Yanbian, China, where they began their new life.
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When he was in Chinese high school, he was recruited by the army as a pilot, but instead, he followed his dream and studied agricultural science.
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After graduating from university, he decided to work in nature and became a cultivator, but he saw it more as an experimental science.
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He published various studies in the field of soil improvement and the use of technology in agriculture. His documents made an important contribution to the development of agriculture in China during his time, and they are still an important basis for further research today.
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Much of what I know about plants today is based on these early experiences and stories. For example, I saw many different kinds of plant propagation for the first time in my grandfather's greenhouse. That you can even combine different plants with each other through different types of grafting amazed me back then. When I saw watermelons growing on pumpkin plants, I stared in wonder, just as I do today. The basics of tissue culture, with plants grown in test tubes, seemed like science-fiction to me. The fact that some plants can develop completely from a single shoot, that offshoots can become trees, was like magic, and it is still like magic to me.
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Of course, these first impressions drove me to research this interest further. On some points, I was pleased to see that I already knew many techniques, even if I had never knowingly learned their names. This helped me further expand my passion and ultimately turn it into a profession. I somehow always saw it as my calling.
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When I came to Vienna from China, everything was different, but not for long. I got to know my husband while we were studying together and over time I realized that he shared my love for nature.
We started growing various herbs and spices from seeds on our windowsill. A small heated greenhouse was bought very quickly for the more exotic specimens, and lamps were purchased as support for the winter.
After a while, we had a little jungle at home with everything from eucalyptus, tea and lemons, chili plants, and over 7 different types of basil, to aloe vera and cacti that we germinated from seeds we had collected on vacation.
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2019 was the year we first came into contact with variegated plants. I remember buying a Pink Princess, bursting with excitement to present it to my grandfather via video chat. As mentioned above, he had invested his whole life in researching plants, but still, he was amazed at the special coloring of the leaves.
From then on I lost myself in the world of variegated plants. Our collection not only grew larger and larger by itself but also became a lot richer in species, causing much pain to our wallets. We started to import different variegated rarities from all over Europe and so over time chilies and tea plants became monsteras, philodendrons, and syngoniums.
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In 2020 everything changed once again. Airlines began to minimize their operations and at some times they even came to a complete standstill. In this surreal situation in which we have been living since the outbreak of the corona pandemic, there have been countless restrictions for me and my husband, who is an entrepreneur on the cultural scene. However, there was one advantage to this unusual situation. We found time for things that we had always wanted to do more intensively for a long time.
It seemed unlikely for visitors to stay with us in the foreseeable future, so we quickly converted our guest room into a "greenhouse". We bought professional lamps, large shelves, humidifiers, substrates, fertilizers, etc. Everything one would need.
We still cannot believe how quickly a single Pink Princess turned into a collection of over 200 variegated plants. Sometimes we step into our guest room and feel like art collectors, having nature as our favorite artist that paints for us every day.​
2021 is a new beginning.
The beginning of Kern Plants.
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