URL rewriting - Remove a subfolder from the url - wordpress

Question

I don't often ask questions on SOF because I usually find the answers just searching on SOF. This time it's a tough one for me! I don't have a lot of experience with htaccess. In fact I don't have much experience, 6 months out of school now!
I am working on a personal project using Wordpress 4.9.8 and Laravel 5.7.
Wordpress will is used as the entry point and the articles part, Laravel will be used for the app part to display large amount of info from database.
I am developing locally with Xampp and MySql Workbench.
I am using a virtual host to simulate the domain name.
The project is structured like so in the root folder:
Wordpress folders and files
htaccess
Laravel folder
all folders and files from Laravel
public
htaccess
The project URL is like so:
dev.domain.com/ -->Wordpress part
dev.domain.com/plants/public --> Laravel part
I need to hide the "public" folder of the URL only and still access that directory.
So far I was able to redirect directly skipping the root folder of Laravel using htaccess.
dev.domain.com/plants to dev.domain.com/plants/public
I can't seem to put the finger on it after trying everything that I found that makes sense and not sure exactly where to put it. At the root of the project or in the public directory for this part?
Here is what I have in the root of the project:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/plantes [NC]
RewriteRule . plantes/public [L]
</IfModule>
What I have in the public folder:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
<IfModule mod_negotiation.c>
Options -MultiViews -Indexes
</IfModule>
RewriteEngine On
-- Handle Authorization Header
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} .
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
-- Redirect Trailing Slashes If Not A Folder...
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.+)/$
RewriteRule ^ %1 [L,R=301]
-- Handle Front Controller...
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>
Thanks for any help or tips!

Answer 1

After trying some solution found on SOF and elsewhere without any success, I turned around to review the way I structured the project to see if there is other simpler way to do this without htaccess.
Here is the new structure:
Wordpress folders and files
htaccess (no particular rules here so far except the ones form WP)
MyApp
Laravel folder (containing all folders and files from Laravel except the public folder)
The content of the public folder
For this to work we need to change some references in the index.php that was in the public folder to reflect the new structure.
Index.php:
require DIR . '/Laravel/vendor/autoload.php';
$app = require_once DIR . '/Laravel/bootstrap/app.php';
That it's... It works!
www.domain.com/myapp/what-ever...
No URL with the public folder in the way.
Now I will need to work to change the name of "MyApp" so it can reflect multi languages using htaccess.
During my search I found this very helpfull: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybJYyU5FPv4