Sprout Home, Chicago

Lush clusters of flowers, trailing fern fronds, and quirky vases make Sprout Home more like a walk-in terrarium than a store. Though its staff of green thumbs offer landscape and garden design advice, the rest of Sprout Home's plants, gardening tools, and whimsical containers are geared towards urban gardeners and making the most of limited apartment and deck space. Windowsill planters, hanging plant pods, and wall-mounted vases make room for blooms even in studio apartments, so city-dwellers can recover their relationship with nature without laying sod in the kitchen. Specialists can even give you advice about how to create and maintain terrariums, micro-sized ecosystems contained within clear glass vessels.