We finally bit the bullet and looked into the Willow Starter Pack after killing yet another innocent pothos, and honestly, we're pretty into it. The setup was refreshingly painless: download the app, pair the sensor and hub, pop it in the soil, connect to wifi, and within a few hours the app was already chatting away with plant scores and little alerts. No manuals, no faff, no standing there squinting at instructions while the plant silently judges you.
The whole gimmick of giving your plant a "voice" sounds a bit naff on paper, but in practice it's genuinely fun. Willow's app tells you when your plant is happy, thirsty, sulking in a dark corner, or generally having a rough day, and there's something weirdly satisfying about opening the app and getting a little mood report like you're checking in on a very leafy, very needy pet. It also does a decent job identifying the plant itself, which saved us a very embarrassing Google Lens moment.
Where it really earns its keep is stopping the classic plant-killing mistakes: overwatering, underwatering, and shoving something that wants indirect light straight onto a sunny windowsill. We've already had one alert flag that a plant wasn't getting enough light because it had been shuffled behind a curtain, which we would absolutely never have noticed ourselves. For anyone who's ever stood in a garden centre thinking "sure, I can keep this alive," the Starter Pack takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.
Now, the annoying bit. The plants do not hold back. Once you're set up, expect a steady stream of notifications: water me, move me, I'm cold, I'm bored, basically. It's charming for about the first week, and then it starts to feel like living with a slightly demanding flatmate who won't stop texting. We get why it's designed this way, the whole point is nagging you into better habits, but there were a few evenings where three separate plants decided to have a crisis at once and the phone wouldn't stop buzzing. A "snooze all" button would go a long way.
The kit itself feels solid rather than flimsy, and we like that the app doesn't just dump raw data on you, it translates everything into plain, actionable tips rather than numbers you need a horticulture degree to interpret. At £34.99 it's not the cheapest gadget for something that essentially tells you to water your plants, but if you've got a track record of accidentally starving or drowning your greenery, it probably pays for itself in plants not murdered.
Would we recommend it? Yes, with the caveat that you go in expecting a chatty houseplant rather than a silent one. If constant nudges from your ficus sound annoying rather than endearing, this might not be for you. But if you want your plants to actually survive past month two, and don't mind a bit of friendly nagging along the way, the Starter Pack does exactly what it promises.
£34.99
Visit plantwithwillow.co.uk