When Hardware Goes to Seed

Every designer I know has a drawer or a shelf of dead hardware—machines that were central to everything for years and now just occupy space, too loaded with memory to throw out and too obsolete to use. The guilt is specific and low-grade. These things held your work. They ran the tools that made the things you made. Dropping them in a recycling bin feels vaguely wrong, but keeping them indefinitely isn’t much better.

Christophe Guinet, working as Monsieur Plant, found a third option. He opens up old Apple machines—iMacs, Mac Pros, PowerBooks—and plants things in them. Actual plants, roots in the hardware, leaves pushing out through what used to be a screen or a vent. The project is called Plant Your Mac, and it’s the kind of idea that makes you wonder why it took this long for someone to do it.

The obvious reading is ecological—the organic reclaiming the technological, nature as the final garbage collector. But what I find more interesting is the design thinking underneath. Guinet isn’t just filling cases with soil; he’s treating the machines as vessels, attending to how each plant relates to its specific form. An iMac’s silhouette becomes a planter with a personality. The nostalgia and the living material work against each other in a way that feels productive rather than merely ironic.

His broader practice runs the same logic through everything: people transformed into living plants, cars rendered as rolling trees, typography grown from moss. Nature as a design medium rather than a theme. It’s a consistent body of work and, taken together, stranger than his cheerful presentation lets on.