From Absurdist Comedy to Sculptural Shrubs
Eric Wareheim – the actor, director, and one half of the cult comedy duo Tim and Eric – spent his post-divorce years doing something few people would predict: obsessively collecting strange, Dr. Seussian trees and shrubs until the hobby outgrew his backyard and became a functioning business with a client list that includes Martha Stewart and interior designer Kelly Wearstler.
What a Divorce Does to a Person’s Weekend Schedule
There is a particular kind of person who, after a marriage ends, throws themselves into something physical and slightly irrational. Some run ultramarathons. Some gut their kitchens. Wareheim, best known for co-creating and starring in Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and later appearing in Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, apparently started acquiring plants – not tasteful fiddle-leaf figs or a modest herb garden, but the kind of twisted, architecturally strange specimens that look like they wandered out of a children’s book illustration.
The plants he gravitates toward share a visual quality: exaggerated forms, unexpected silhouettes, the kind of growth patterns that make a person stop mid-conversation to stare. Think less “wellness corner at a WeWork” and more “something a Roald Dahl character would own.” The collecting started as personal obsession, the way most serious collections do – quietly, then all at once.
Wareheim’s public persona has always operated in a specific register: deadpan, visually extreme, committed to the bit past the point of comfort. His comedy with Tim Heidecker built a devoted following on public-access-TV aesthetics and anti-humor that ran deeper the longer you watched it. That same sensibility – an eye for the formally weird, a tolerance for things that don’t quite fit – maps surprisingly well onto the world of rare plant collecting, where value is determined largely by strangeness and patience.
It also makes a certain cultural sense that this happened after a divorce. The post-separation period has a way of clarifying what a person actually wants to spend time doing, stripped of the negotiation and compromise a shared life requires. For Wareheim, that apparently meant hours with unusual trees, a preference that turned out to be commercially viable in ways he probably didn’t anticipate when he first started accumulating them.
The Business, the Clients, and the Hipster Economy of Rare Plants
At some point the collection became an enterprise. Wareheim turned his plant obsession into what the New Yorker describes as a “hipster business” – a characterization that captures something real about where the rare plant market sits culturally right now. The past several years have seen an explosion of interest in unusual botanicals, driven partly by the pandemic-era houseplant boom and partly by a longer-running design trend that treats plants as sculptural objects rather than decorative afterthoughts. Into that market, Wareheim walked with a curatorial eye and a reputation that opened doors fast.
Martha Stewart and Kelly Wearstler are not clients you land by accident. Stewart has spent decades building her authority across domesticity, food, and design with a precision that intimidates most people who attempt a similar breadth. Wearstler is among the most influential interior designers working in America – her projects are studied, referenced, and imitated across the industry. The fact that both of them have sought out Wareheim’s plant business says something about the legitimacy it carries, beyond whatever novelty factor his celebrity provides.
Wearstler in particular represents a specific kind of validation. Her design vocabulary runs toward the bold and the unexpected – spaces that feel collected rather than decorated, where individual objects carry enough visual weight to anchor a room. A sculptural tree sourced from someone with genuine taxonomic passion fits that aesthetic in a way that a generic landscaping vendor never would. The plants Wareheim deals in are, functionally, art objects for people who want something living.
The business’s positioning as “hipster” is interesting partly because it sidesteps the word “luxury,” which is what it probably is. Rare specimen plants – the kind with unusual growth patterns, significant age, or botanical obscurity – command serious money. They require specialized knowledge to source, maintain, and transport. Wareheim’s comedy background means he approaches the enterprise with irreverence, but irreverence and high prices coexist easily when the product is genuinely scarce and visually extraordinary. The clients suggest the market is there.
There is also something worth noting about the specific aesthetic Wareheim has gravitated toward. Dr. Seussian is a meaningful descriptor here – it points toward plants that have an almost cartoon quality, forms that seem exaggerated even though they grew that way naturally. That sensibility runs directly through his comedy work, where the visual logic is always pushed slightly past realism into something that feels like a dream someone else had. The plants are, in a way, an extension of the same creative instinct. Just slower. Rooted in the actual ground.
Celebrity Side Projects That Actually Make Sense
Most celebrity business ventures generate skepticism for good reason – they tend to monetize fame rather than genuine expertise. Wareheim’s plant business is harder to dismiss partly because the origin story is private rather than public. This wasn’t a brand launch or a lifestyle pivot announced on social media. It started as a solitary post-divorce hobby, accumulated over years, and became commercial because the knowledge and the collection reached a scale that made it viable. That sequence – obsession first, business second – tends to produce something more durable.
Wareheim is still working in comedy and television. The plant business hasn’t replaced his creative career; it runs alongside it in the way that serious side pursuits sometimes do for people who have more than one thing they’re genuinely good at. What’s unusual is watching someone whose public image is built on chaos and anti-comedy build something that requires patience, botanical knowledge, and a client-services sensibility precise enough to satisfy Martha Stewart. Does that tension eventually resolve, or is that exactly the point?
