Rooting For You

By Kyndall Krist

In the plant lover community, Maria Failla ’11 is best known for her successful podcast, “Bloom and Grow Radio.” However, her beginnings at Rice might surprise you. “Broadway was always my dream,” Failla said. “I knew that I wanted to be a singing musical theater performer — dance was never my area of expertise. So I thought, I’ll go get my degree in opera and train my instrument to the highest level, and then transition with the finest-tuned instrument into musical theater to help give me a competitive edge.” This led the Westchester, New York, native to the Shepherd School of Music to earn her Bachelor of Music degree in opera studies.

After graduation, the soprano landed touring roles in beloved musicals such as “The Sound of Music,” “Evita” and “West Side Story.” In 2019, she did a brief stint on Broadway performing in “Cats,” then toured nationally with the show throughout that year. Her career came to a halt in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the U.S., but fortunately she had a passion project to fall back on.

In 2017, the self-proclaimed “serial plant killer” tried to hone her skills after moving into an apartment in New York City with her now fiancé, Billy Morrissey. This time, she educated herself on plant care through Google searches, reading articles and books, and asking her green-thumb mom for advice. After successfully growing an herb garden on her small balcony, she gained enough confidence to venture back into houseplants. “We went, literally and figuratively, from zero to 60 plants in three months,” Failla laughed.

Being a fan of podcasts, she discovered a lack of houseplant-specific programming, so in November 2017 she created “Bloom and Grow Radio” to continue learning by interviewing experts on a wide variety of topics — from understanding watering, pruning and natural light to lessons on specific types of plants such as hoyas, fiddle leaf figs and monsteras. Over the years, the podcast’s audience grew beyond her expectations, now with more than 1 million downloads and reaching listeners in 80-plus countries.

While podcasting and musical theater performance might seem unrelated, Failla recognizes the commonalities between the two. “[The podcast] is a platform just like the stage is,” she explained. “As a performer, you want that connection with the audience through telling a story. … Through ‘Bloom and Grow,’ I’m using my voice in a different way to help educate people to use plants to distract them, to help them see their lives a little bit differently, to help bring joy to their space.”

Over the years, the podcast’s audience grew beyond her expectations, now with more than 1 million downloads and reaching listeners in 80-plus countries.

Despite grieving the loss of live onstage performance, Failla said the pandemic has given her the opportunity to explore new life experiences. The couple went from a 500-square-foot apartment to living on 5 acres of land in the Catskills of upstate New York. “The beauty of the pandemic is that it’s made some space for me to consider what [‘Bloom and Grow’] could look like as a job if it just had more of my time,” she said. “I’m fortunate that I have something else that I’m so passionate about.”