Green Academia Aesthetic Decor: How to Transform Your Home Into a Vintage Botanical Oasis
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What do you think would happen if you took dark academia and gave it a green color palette, filled it with plants, and had it double major in botany and environmental science? The green academia aesthetic would happen. 🌿📖
And today I’m exploring the green academia aesthetic and giving you a bunch of decor ideas and inspiration for it!
If you love dark academia decor, antique shopping, moody green decor, and earthy fantasy styles like goblincore, watch on for inspo on creating your own romantic botanical oasis!
Would you rather watch than read? Here’s the video! ↓
What is Green Academia?
Like dark academia, green academia celebrates intellectualism and scholastic endeavors through a very romanticized lens. But instead of a gothic romance, it’s a biophilic romance. There’s definitely more of an emphasis on nature here.
If dark academia is a professor of Post-Industrial Revolution Gothic Literature, green academia is a professor of Horticultural Studies.
If dark academia takes place in a candlelit Victorian library, green academia takes place in a lush conservatory. And it’s filled with leather bound journals containing pressed botanicals and field notes, beakers and apothecary bottles testing the soil viability of the surrounding area, and the scents of dirt and leaves and flowers.
But it’s not about plants alone. It’s the combination of nature and the classic academia aesthetic details; old books, brass candlestick holders, vintage accents, a bust or two.
Green academia speaks to two very core aspects of humanity: our connection to nature and our thirst for knowledge.
And interestingly, those two things have proven to be incompatible in a lot of ways. Our quest for knowledge leads to innovation, which leads to technology, which can lead to the destruction of nature. So there’s that tension in green academia.
But at the same time, there’s a purity to green academia. The knowledge it’s seeking is to understand and help the environment. It celebrates nature. And I think that’s what draws us to it. It represents healthy innovation rooted in a reverence for nature, rather than apathy for it.
Green Academia Inspiration
Rachel Maksy made a YouTube video a couple years ago in which she transformed her bedroom into a moody green Victorian paradise. And even though she doesn’t explicitly say she’s going for a green academia look, I think the end result is definitely green academia coded.
This pretty much ticks all the boxes: a green color palette, antique details, plants, books. And the forest accent wall is obviously exquisite.
It’s all just pure romance. That’s a key thing to keep in mind when doing green academia - there has to be romance and there has to be whimsy.
So when you’re styling a green academia room, don’t lose touch with the fact that you’re creating a fantasy. This is one of those styles that’s supposed to give you an escape from the real world, restraint be damned.
And what you’ll end up with is something like Rachel Maksy’s bedroom - a little fantasy that you can retreat to and luxuriate in complete, exquisite green.
Then there’s @moodywhimsicalforest on Instagram, whose home is just devastatingly beautiful. And she definitely has a green academia vibe going on as well. It’s not straightforward, strictly green academia, but this is really good inspiration for the direction you can go.
It has the books, it has the green, it has the antique details, and she obviously knows her way around an accent wall. Seriously, if you’re not in the mood to wallpaper and entire wall or you’re afraid of the commitment, this is such a great alternative.
And side note: I really enjoyed reading this this carousel of hers on the psychology of why she craves moody interiors - a girl after my own heart.
She says that she loves dark academia (which can also apply to green academia) because:
“Books signal depth, intelligence, and introspection. As a former high school teacher I love to revisit literature from my favorite authors such as Shakespeare (Macbeth is my favorite) and poet Emily Dickinson. I also love to find historic works I’ve never heart of when I’m thrifting. This activates a more introspective, grounded state of mind. Dark academia isn’t just aesthetic - it’s phsycologically tied to intellectual identity and emotional depth”. — @moodywhimsicalforest
And that really is just it, isn’t it? Academia styles - dark, light, green and everything in between - have so much meat on the bone in terms of depth and meaning.
Green academia is an opportunity to lean into your intellect, as well as your sense of romance, and create something beautiful AND mentally stimulating.
And both of these creators have done just that with their styling. I give them both an A+ for the in-depth visual essays that are their homes. 🤓
Green Academia Decor Ideas
Now, if you want to incorporate some green academia into your space, here are some ideas!
Decorative Accents
Wall Art
Lighting
A major motif with green academia is botanical art, like sketches you’d find in an old field journal or botany text book. They convey nature from a studious perspective, whether it’s methodical and scientific or the more untamed look of plants superimposed over words.
It’s about the partnership of humans and nature, or maybe even the competition between the two. Nature will always have her way, no matter how much we try to reason with her. No matter how much we try to understand nature and our place in it, we’re just as delicate and mortal as a bundle of flowers.
I was also really vibing with femininity for this look, specifically an intellctual kind of femininity. I love image of a Victorian woman languishing on the couch with a book, surrounded by green, like an exhausted mother nature who’s sick and tired of the antics of men.
And sometimes you can even find a single piece that represents both sides simultaneously. I love the idea of a stack of books being conquered by flowers. Like I said, nature will always have her way, and when we and our books are gone, she’ll still be here.
But until then, we coexist. We put stems in bottles and sometimes even make the stoppers in nature’s image, like some kind of tribute. We create little apothecary cabinets for storing herbs and medicines or anything else we want to tuck away, and even still sometimes marking the drawers with a floral tribute to our connection to nature. Even our lamps often resemble flowers and plants.
References to nature - both concsious and unconscious - are so common in design that you have to wonder… why are we humans so fixated on it?
What void are we trying to fill?
Biophilia
Let’s take a moment and backtrack to that gorgeous SAT word I used earlier: Biophilia.
“A hypothetical human tendency to interact or be closely associated with other forms of life in nature. A desire or tendency to commune with nature.” — Merriam Webster
Basically, biophilia posits that we have a genetic, evolutionary need for natural surroundings for the sake of our physical and mental wellbeing.
“The human appreciation for flowers… was due to the fact that for many plant species, flowers signal that fruit (a rich source of nutrients for early humans) would be arriving soon. And human fondness for baby animals suggests that affiliating with animals, and protecting the most vulnerable among them, provided early people with an evolutionary advantage.” — Psychology Today
So when you’re shopping for decor for your apartment, or just browsing Pinterest for inspiration, you may find that a lot of what you’re attracted to is nature-oriented. A plant-filled living room. A vintage floral art piece. A tree lined view outside the window.
Theoretically, those are your survival instincts kicking in.
And as a species with the natural instincts to survive in the wild and to learn and innovate, green academia really serves as a nexus of those two very core parts of us. But one of those things is much more absent from our lives than it used to be in the early days of humanity.
For many of us, nature is not really part of our daily lives, and there’s no denying that as a species we are more disconnected from nature than we’ve ever been.
“If biophilia delivers benefits to humans, then our increased distance and detachment from the natural world, due to urbanization, technological advances, and other factors, could have negative effects on our well-being—not to mention on nature itself.” — Psychology Today
There’s a void we’re trying to fill here. There’s something ancient that still lives in our bones, this connection to nature that’s been fragmented by steel and concrete and screens.
And a lot of us don’t have the time, money, or energy to make like Theroux and go to the woods, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
Green academia, along with all nature-oriented aesthetics and decor pieces, make us feel like we’re filling that void. It satisfies - or at least gives the illusion of satisfying - our biophilic tendencies.
Green Academia Living Room Design
So, how can all of this come together? Here’s a living room design I created with some of the decor pieces I found!
See how it’s relentlessly green? I think a style like this is a lovely opportunity to go full color drench with paint. If this were a real room, you bet your ass I’d be painting the ceiling green too, along with the walls.
It also has a bit of that scholarly academia vibe, with the antique details, the books, and an air that an environmental science professor with impeccable taste lives here. That’s what we’re going for.
And we’re also, of course, going for a lush, plant-filled oasis that will satisfy our biophilic desires. I feel like spending daily life in a living room like this would have medicinal effects on my mind and soul, and that really is the power of interior styling.
If the aesthetic experience of nature can have a profound impact on our mental health, then doesn’t that also apply to whatever decor decisions we make? If we must live a modern human existence that’s largely divorced from nature - at least compared to how we started as a species - then isn’t it a survival necessity for us to create our own safe natural habitats in our little apartments?
My 500 sq ft studio in the middle of the city can be my own little ecosystem of mental health coping mechanisms that help me and my child (my cat) survive. Doesn’t she deserve happiness??
