About Gardenia

Gardenia is a European brand making one thing well: a way to grow food indoors that you would actually want to look at.

It started with a small frustration. Everything sold for growing herbs inside looked like it had escaped from a laboratory — moulded plastic, clinical blue-white light, a screen blinking on a kitchen counter. The alternative was a supermarket pot that died within a fortnight, or a windowsill that goes dark from October to March. Neither felt like it belonged in a home.

What we set out to make

A planter first and a device second. The GrowPod 1.0 is a hydroponic planter with a full-spectrum light above it: sixty-eight LEDs, 1,100 lumens, twenty watts. It draws about what a reading lamp does, and it reads as a lamp in the room rather than equipment on the counter.

The rest follows from that. Warm light instead of clinical light. Aluminium instead of glossy plastic. No screen, no app, no notifications — a narrow window on the front tells you when the water is low, and that is the entire interface.

How we think about growing

Plants are not complicated, but they are unforgiving about the two things they need most: light and water. Most indoor growing fails because a windowsill in Central Europe simply does not deliver enough light for half the year, not because anyone did anything wrong.

Hydroponics solves the other half. Roots sit in nutrient-rich water rather than soil, so there is nothing to repot, nothing to spill, and no daily watering to remember. You top up the reservoir when it runs low and cut what you need for dinner.

What we will not do

We will not tell you a plant is ready in a number of days we cannot stand behind, invent reviews we have not received, or dress a specification up as something it is not. The GrowPod is rated IP42 — protected against dust and light water splashes, not waterproof — and we would rather say so plainly than let you find out.

Where we are

Gardenia is a European business shipping to Austria and Germany, with the EU statutory two-year warranty and fourteen-day right of withdrawal on everything we sell.

If something is unclear, or a plant is misbehaving, write to us. We answer.