If you’ve been longing to fill your home with greenery, but find yourself struggling with how to do so in a small space, I have excellent news for you: You can get micro succulents on Etsy now — and they’re as beautiful and adorable as they are easy to care for. Created by Durham, North Carolina-based Etsy seller Tierra Sol Studio, this little cactus-and-planter set is so tiny, it measures under one inch total — and if you want to lean really far into the trend, you can even request the smallest one they currently have available by leaving a message to that effect in the Notes section when you check out. Yes, yes, and yes.
This little set includes both a teeny hand-made ceramic planter and an actual cactus grown in Tierra Sol Studio’s own greenhouse. The set does arrive disassembled; however, instructions for getting the cactus at home in the planter — which the seller notes are “fun and easy” — are included. They’ve even made sure to pack some white sand with the set for you, both for drainage and to give the whole thing a “clean visual design,” per the listing. Your micro cactus will also arrive with instructions for its care — which, given that succulents and cacti are some of the easiest plants to take care of, should be relatively simple to follow. Even if you don’t usually have a green thumb, this itty-bitty delight should thrive in even the smallest of spaces.
Micro succulents are what Etsy terms “extreme-sized products” — items which are either very small or very large, typically in ways they wouldn’t normally be. And it turns out that these kinds of items are currently topping the charts in terms of the online marketplace’s most popular picks — or at least, according to its Instagram account. In a recent post on Etsy's blog, the site's trend expert, Dayna Isom Johnson, highlighted the current top 10 most popular items as determined by the number of likes they had received when posted on Etsy's Insta (and given that the Etsy Instagram has more than two million followers, that’s really saying something).
Far and away the most popular item right now isn’t actually the micro-succulents — it’s a kid’s bed that looks like a little house sold by ShopKMDesigns. The Instagram post featuring it currently has more than 260,000 likes on it. But Tierra Sol Studio’s teeny-tiny cactus and planter still ranks quite highly; with more than 37,000 likes at the time Etsy's blog post went live and more than 38,000 likes as of this writing, the micro-succulent Instagram post is the fifth most popular on Etsy’s page.
However, although Tierra Sol Studio’s micro cacti and succulents are certainly some of the teeniest available on Etsy, they’re not the only ones. Indeed, the prevalence of these itty-bitty plants and planters on the site is what takes them from being a neat little curiosity to full-on trend status. They tend to vary in size, but they might be as large (comparatively speaking, at least) as two or two and a half inches or as small as just one inch. You can also find listings that include both pots and plants or just pots — so, y’know, make sure you read carefully so you know what you’re actually getting before you order.
Personally, I’m partial to this pair of Star Wars-themed planters from seller MicroTerra; it’s a set of two, with one designed to look like the Millennium Falcon and the other like the Death Star. They’re both about two inches in diameter and include one air plant each. These little candy-colored planters from Jasmine Supply are cute, too, though; the set of six doesn’t include the succulents, but the planters themselves are adorably tiny at just three centimeters in diameter (just over an inch).
Oh, and if see a planter you love that doesn’t include the plant itself? There’s an easy solution to the problem: You can also find mini succulents and succulent cuttings all on their own on Etsy, too — meaning you can get yourself the planter and plant separately and then put the two together on your own. Feel free to mix and match to make your perfect micro succulent setup.
Keeping a few houseplants around has been shown to have a variety of mental health benefits, ranging from helping keep your anxiety levels down and encouraging creative thinking—and even if you don’t have a ton of experience in plant-care, these micro succulents might be just the thing to start with. Check out Tierra Sol Studio’s shop here, and find more miniature succulents and cacti here. Happy gardening!
