Daniel Michael - The Plant Superhero

Daniel Michael Is The Plant Superhero You Never Thought You Needed. And If It Were Up To Him, You’d Be Growing Your Own Produce Too.

- Azhar Rahim

There are two types of plant people: Those who give a lot of love to their plants, and those who can’t. Now, with travel restrictions mostly lifted, and more people heading out of the country for their long-awaited holidays, the former have found themselves turning into the latter—and their plants are suffering. That’s where Daniel Michael comes in.

“My friends used to call me about their dead or dying plants, and it is mostly because they’ve just returned from their travels and their plants have not been receiving much care the entire time,” he shares.

The good news is that Michael is always happy to help and freely dispenses plant care advice. It is a superpower, so to speak, that has led to people calling him Plant Man Dan—a moniker he has embraced since 2013 when he first joined Sustenir, one of Singapore’s first urban farming start-ups. “A lot of people used to make jokes about me and call me the plant man for fun. They’re not entirely wrong, so I have learnt to embrace that identity.”

And embrace it he has. Even after leaving the company in 2015 to join GuavaPass (a fitness and wellness club aggregator which was later acquired by ClassPass at the start of 2019), the nickname stuck and the calls about plants continued. He says: “Hundreds of people still call or message me about growing plants in their home. At that time, I never thought about commercialising it at all. It was just something I was happy to share.”