Pots of gold: the world’s most expensive house plants (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Pots of gold: the world’s most expensive house plants (2022)

theguardian.com

71 pointsacdanger39 comments

I didn’t realize this weird little world is so wide spread. I’m into tissue culturing and noticed a lot of people becoming a bit obsessed with culturing certain species, but I was totally perplexed when I saw some cultures selling for thousands. Even hundreds is crazy.

This reminds me of the old days when you’d spend quite a bit to get various strains of mycelium. Not as statusy by any stretch, but seems just as bizarre on the surface.

Ultimately these plants are worth pocket change once they flood the market. It’s only impressive to have them while they’re still rare.

Another totally bizarre part is how these genetic mutations which make the plants desirable often disappear as the plants grow.

I do plant tissue culture at OSU and I'm wondering what you mean, do people do it as like a hobby? I've only heard of it in the context of transformation

Tissue culture is also used without genetic engineering. Orchid flasking is the classic example, since the seedlings require an external source of energy. A symbiotic fungus provides that in nature, but it's easier to replace that with the usual agar medium.

Many other species can be propagated conventionally, but will grow faster in tissue culture. That's typically referred to as micropropagation, and widely used for aroids (like here), flytraps, cactus, etc. It's also common for aquarium plants, I think because that eliminates the risk of introducing pests.

Yes, exactly. I use it for aquarium plants. You can start with a $20 culture from the store and turn it into 100 starter plants over a couple months or so. I love densely planted tanks, and the whole process is just fun and fascinating. If you’ve got the gear already, it’s worth playing around and learning something new.

This was what got me started because I was blown away that bucephalandra was $20 for a tiny pot of cultured starts: https://www.plantcelltechnology.com/bloghow-to-grow-bucephal...

You won’t save much if you don’t already have the equipment, though you can do this low-tech for remarkably little investment too.

Tissue culture is the easiest way to (often illegally) export it out of some countries.

I find it interesting. I think I could make money from it, but I’m not interested in much other than learning and creating a lot of plants to put in my aquariums.

I can propagate plants the old fashioned way, but many of them are incredibly slow growing. Tissue cultures can yield a dozen viable plants per jar, then I can grow them out in semi hydroponic settings until they’re suitable for putting into a tank (at which point I kind of “drip acclimate” them to their destination tank for a week or two to prevent melting (in which an environmental shock causes foliage to senesce).

I’d like to see interesting mutations out of curiosity, but so far the clones are identical to their parents. I use relatively low-key hormones, so that might be why. I only keep chemicals that won’t harm my kids, more or less.

I've had nothing but trouble with plant tissue culture. A lot of mold contamination and never any growth or rooting.

Did you use a still air box or laminar flow hood when working with your cultures?

Owned a plant store up for a few years (closed earlier this year). One of the primary growers of "rare" plants in the US was Costa Farms out of Florida. For instance, the it plant for awhile was a Thai Constellation - the prices for a 4" were often north of $300+. Wholesale maybe $150ish. At some point Costa realized they couldn't grow them reliably (from seed) and flooded the market with their plants. You can now find decent 6" plants for cheaper than what the 4" was.

Similarly Pink Princesses started flooding Lowe's, Home Depot, etc. I get the idea of having your bucket list plants and wanting to get them at cheap prices if at all possible. Often, those from HD, etc. were not cared for properly and many had bugs and/or root rot and wouldn't last long.

The whole plant market for house plants was interesting.

Regionally things in CA were easy to get, but hard in OR/WA. The reverse was also true.

It was a fun business while it lasted for us, aside from the annoyance of reading FB groups where people obsessed about the lowest possible price - etc... We finally closed up shop mainly due to life being busy with higher priorities and finding reliable help (even paying well above minimum wage) was next to impossible.

Scored a giant Esqueleto from Costa Farms on sale recently. $50 including shipping and even came in a nice pot.

Thai Constellations are still hot where I'm at on the west coast. No nursery has them for less than $150 and they tend to be beaten up. Asked one nursery why theirs was so mangled and they said it was cause people kept trying to steal cuttings off it.

It does sound like a rough business though. Everyone who's a collector is in it for the best deal, for sure.

We have a couple Thai’s in our personal collection. The retail prices are still high, but down from a year or so back and much easier to find.

I mentioned below, I just picked one up today from a collector I've been buying a bunch of stuff from. $40 for two giant leaves and a big root ball. Over the moon to add this to my collection!

Why is it so expensive? It’s a very muddled looking pattern. Not trying to be dismissive, just curious.

Pretty simple, it was fairly rare and became a collectors item among plant lovers.

https://costafarms.com/blogs/get-growing/monstera-thai-const...

Do you have any advice or resources to share with someone considering entering the market? It seems so volatile right now its unadvisable. How long were you in operation?

Pot plant mania has declined since its peak a few years ago in New Zealand when tiny monstera was going for $100, while you can get a large established monstera for $100 today. Unlike tulip bulbs pot plants do have aesthetic value and those who overpaid did it because they genuinely wanted a plant, not for speculation.

> Unlike tulip bulbs pot plants do have aesthetic value

Tulip bulbs can be directly used to produce aesthetic value in exactly the same manner as pot plants.

> tiny monstera was going for $100, while you can get a large established monstera for $100 today.

This isn't about monstera, it's about Mini Monstera (Brand name) and Monstera ‘Albo’

> Unlike tulip bulbs pot plants do have aesthetic value

Tulipmania is mostly made up and still is a global billion $ business 400 years latter and it does bring beauty to the world for anyone who's not a dried up HN user angry they can't understand tech anymore.

But there is an element like expensive watches where Monstera Albo were both a status symbol and a complex thing of pleasure but unlike tulips I can't see it continuing.

A Monstera albo is not going to beat my 15 foot monstera long term, I don't think humans like unsymmetric variegated plants. Without being told it's impressive I'm not sure it is.

Here’s a link debunking the tulip mania myth [1]. Put shortly, the myth was created as a moral campaign against speculators. Interestingly, one of the propagators of the myth was complicit in pumping the rail bubble, which did far more economic damage.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...

On Ebay they sell pothos for monsteras.

On Etsy , it seems everything is a scam. They set up a shop selling plastic toys or dolls, then they switch to expensive plant cuttings that are obvious scams, and etsy seems to do absolutely nothing about it.

Until those marketplaces start being held liable for scams there is no incentive for them to care since they take a cut of the proceeds.

On the other hand I'm not sure what's scammy about this? As far as I know selling something for a huge margin is not in itself a scam?

> Until those marketplaces start being held liable for scams there is no incentive for them to care since they take a cut of the proceeds.

Wait, are we talking about Amazon or Etsy?

Both would fit the mold just as well no?

Apparently the /s was more necessary than I thought...

They don't actually sell the expensive stuff, they scam people with other plants

This is hilarious because it hits close to home. I think my wife has most of the plants described in the article and she’d never leave them in the care of a teenager or if she did she’d be checking in daily to get a video update.

I sell a few of these species and it's good to know those tech salaries are going to good use :)

My wife isn’t in tech.

I was talking about your salary.

How is that relevant to my wife’s hobby?

Maybe I should clarify, but I don’t understand why I need to: my wife has her own occupation and income and pays for her own hobbies.

I didn't see this mentioned but I think it's worth pointing out some plants are just rare to a region, rather than being rare globally. They're hard to get a hold of in stores or nurseries so people rely on private or online sales to obtain them. Both options are pretty fraught; not everyone knows how to actually trim a plant for propagation, some plants don't propagate but are sold as if they do, and some people are just cruelly selling leaves they've chopped off. There's also this entire side industry of people who will graft flowers to cacti and paint succulents which often will kill the host in due time.

As someone that takes care of a lot of plants the idea of selling plant clippings for propagation seems wrong. Unless you're selling an already rooted seedling you're putting a lot to chance. Not every propagation will take and a fair amount of the chance depends on the person taking care of it doing the right things.

> “I’ve heard from growers I really respect that they were asking upwards of $40,000 for some of their varieties,” says Tyler Thrasher, a US plant propagator who is the host of the popular podcast Greenhouse Rants. “It’s usually because those plants will end up in a tissue culture lab where they can be turned into millions in a couple of years.”

That's pretty much the only explanation that would make sense - these are all clonal plants that the purchaser will duplicate and resell for much more reasonable prices. Seems like there's a fad-time component to get them cloned and grown before competitors can find another sample.

Same thing happens to popular cannabis cultivars.

Many of the plants mentioned in this story are no longer rare or expensive, depending on how easy they are to propagate. For example, the article mentions a “Pink Princess” Philodendron. These are not difficult to grow, but the pink variegation is notoriously unstable. In 2019 I sold a small one of these plants for $125. Today you can buy a similar plant for $20-40 on Etsy from a reputable US seller.

Seems like if you want to make serious money as a breeder you need to get ahead of the wave. I'm surprised atomic gardening isn't more popular. You can take a bunch of plants around some cobalt-60, let it go to seed, explore the mutant progeny for phenotypes of interest. Many commercially significant crops were found using this technique. It's basically a hack for the breeder to introduce phenotypic diversity through mutation where there wasn't any before, within a single growing season to boot. Imagine what you could do with a monstera like this. Maybe you will find some unicorn phenotype like true breeding purple leaves, now that would fetch a price especially if you were the only breeder in the world with these genetics.

My house is full of all sorts of semi-rare plants now. It is a whole weird little subculture on social networks.

In fact, I just picked up two nice big leaves (with a huge root ball) of Monstera Thai Constellation today, for $40. Lesser versions can go for hundreds. Feeling pretty happy about that one.

(2022)

Did they ever link the reddit post?

I found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/tkcl5b/aita_...

Same thing with coral it’s like the plants of the sea except they are technically animals

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