Alice Krzeminska has carved out an unusual niche in the superyacht sector: keeping living plants alive at sea. The founder of Pure Botany, she is also a member of the Metstrade Young Professionals Club, and her business draws on botany, interior design, and superyacht operations.
Her path to the marine industry was anything but direct. She began as an executive assistant at a Toyota dealership before moving to river cruise vessels and then ocean-going cruise ships. While working aboard, she studied floristry and began taking responsibility for onboard plants, eventually transitioning to superyachts. She has now been in the maritime industry for around a decade.
Her formal qualifications have expanded alongside her practical experience. She holds an undergraduate degree in botany, studied via correspondence, and has completed environmental science coursework including an environmental officer ticket. She is continuing to study and aims to reach PhD level, though she acknowledges that will take years.
Growing owner interest in biophilic design and wellness is driving demand for living plants aboard superyachts. Krzeminska describes installations that have grown considerably in scale, including two and a half metre trees, bonsai specimens, and multi-metre exterior plant beds integrated into deck structures. The most ambitious setups tend to appear on superyachts over 100 metres, and she has worked on one vessel with more than 120 plants.
A well-cited example is the 73m Sanlorenzo Virtuosity, which features a living Ficus Nitida tree rising through two decks. Giacomo Treppo, Head Of Style Department at Sanlorenzo, has described the thinking behind it: "The tree, for us…was not an intuition, but a deliberate architectural choice. A complete project that integrates multiple decks and connects them together."
One of Krzeminska's core goals through Pure Botany is to get designers, shipyards, and owners involved from the start of a project. Plants, she argues, should be integrated into a vessel's design from the outset rather than added as a finishing touch.
The work also involves tackling biosecurity. Because the use of living plants as decoration aboard vessels is relatively new, no international framework currently exists to govern it. Cruise ships sidestep the problem by replacing living plants with artificial ones when operating in regions where biosecurity issues may arise. Krzeminska began working with the plant protection side of the Food and Agriculture Department of the United Nations at the beginning of last year to develop a framework, modelled on instruments such as the IMO Garbage Record Book. She has been consulting with the superyacht and cruise ship industries and is in contact with regulators in Australia and New Zealand, which she describes as having the toughest regulations globally.
"If we can agree with those countries what needs to be done with living plants on board as decoration, then it should be relatively easy to address other jurisdictions," she says. "It's a very interesting part of what I have got myself into and work is in progress."
She found her involvement with the Metstrade Young Professionals Club valuable, particularly for the connections it offered outside her immediate professional circle. "Sometimes the journey of a business founder is lonely," she says. The club gave her a space to engage with peers across different disciplines and to meet senior industry figures through the Meet the Expert sessions, where she singles out Henk de Vries from Feadship.
The Young Professionals Club was founded by Metstrade in 2011 to support the leisure marine industry's efforts to recruit and retain young talent. Access to the club lounge and its associated programme is free to all registered visitors and exhibitors at the show aged under 40.
