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Comment by foooobaba | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been trying to find a place to buy this plant (Texas, USA) for 3 years. Every place online I have found is always out of stock. Right now is actually the season to plant it, so I’ve been looking for it again. Has anyone found a place to buy it that is not out of stock and ships to the US?

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Given its native range,[0] I highly doubt you'd be able to recreate it's native environment very well. Year-round rain, very hummus-rich soil, yet up to 2 weeks of snow per year. It's also dioecious so you'll need both male and female flowers for it to reproduce. Not to mention that it's a parasitic plant and likely has very specific relationships with its most common hosts. Also many plants from areas like this have very specific mycorrhizal associations so on top of that you might also require the right soil ecosystem. It's quite likely that it relies on some specific fungal species that's endemic to that area too given the uniqueness of the environment

Are you experienced with growing plants this difficult? I'm big into plants and spend a lot of time reading about plants like these and it always saddens me to read about cool plants and then see that they're endangered because of wild harvesting to sell on the market. I always wonder who the hell is buying this. B. trifoliolata has not yet been evaluated for whether or not its endangered and it's unlikely it will any time soon since parasitic plants are notoriously hard to diagnose. Please don't go out searching for this unless you're absolutely sure you have the equipment and knowledge necessary to actually propagate this plant. A quick search on the Tropical Fruit Forum[1] shows that no one else has really had much success in cultivating this

[0] https://www.gbif.org/species/7306115 [1] https://tropicalfruitforum.com/

Yeah I would be growing this indoors in my home lab, where I can control the environment with a growth chamber.

I just want to study it more as it is a pretty fascinating plant.

It's definitely in stock. It just looks like a rubber plant or a swiss cheese plant or a...

why do you want to potentially introduce a plant from the chilean rainforest into texas? there are plenty of interesting plants here already.

Maybe because it is unique, to our knowledge?

Nobody expects it to survive and propagate outdoors.

I don’t want to do that, but I do want to grow it in a climate controlled growth chamber and study it. It’s a fascinating plant.

oh gotcha, apologies for jumping to conclusions.

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