Would you be surprised to hear that there are plants that routinely sell a single leaf with roots for $300-$400 USD?
A few weeks ago I was trying to figure out what to do with my newly acquired and not yet mature Monstera Deliciosa. And no, this isn’t a story about Harry Potter. It’s a fairly common house plant with a very popular rare form. Among articles and blog posts, I was seeing these amazing white variegated versions of the plant, but when I looked it up to try to buy one, I was shocked at the prices they were listed for.
It turns out, statistics will show us, that if enough people are growing lots of a plant, there will be genetic variations that pop up here and there. Even more rare, every once in a while, that variation results in something beautiful, or enigmatic, or interesting.
In the case of Monstera Deliciosa, that would be how the world was introduced to Monstera Albo. A rare genetic variant of the original green plant that results in brilliant white and light green variegation.
I’ve heard stories told that some growers would throw out these plants because they merely saw them as inconsistencies. They must be kicking themselves now.
Variegation is an interesting attribute. At the same time it makes the plant beautiful it also renders it less vigorous. Every square inch of white on the plant is a spot the plant is missing it’s chlorophyll, the solar generators of the plant world. It’s like going to a solar farm and taking a quarter of the panels out. The end result is you end up with slower growing plants. slower plants are harder to grow, harder to commercialize, harder to propagate and more risky to ramp up production.
Of course, once people saw a few of these rare beauties, the hunt was on.
Because Monstera Albo is still at heart a very forgiving and easy plant to grow, when people got their hands on one, they were successful in growing it out into a stunning showpiece. Many of which made their way into Instagram feeds and Tik-Tok.
All of a sudden, everyone could see how brilliant these beauties were that now graced our social media platforms.
Surprisingly, they’re not especially unique in how interesting and beautiful they are. There are many varieties of plants that have rare variegated forms that are relatively hard to acquire, and equally beautiful, but usually less easy to care for.
It’s usually the difficult to care for plants that command higher prices, because it’s just less common for someone to be successful growing one and propagating it. Combine easy access to information that these rarities exist, and where to find them, with few plants to meet demand and you can often get prices in the four digit range.
Monstera Albo was a little different: it just so popular that no one could grow enough to satisfy the demand. For a period of time, it wasn’t $400 for a leaf, it was double or triple that. Bonkers.
Another thing I learned: growers will actually hold back plants, not sell them in order for demand to stay high. And sometimes they only release the junky sub-par plants to start with. This makes sense from a business perspective, and it’s an interesting side effect of the system around houseplant growth and sales.
What did I learn from all of this?
One: there is a special, elite level of plant owners that follows trends, propagates cuttings, and find the rarest and most beautiful plants on the planet. It made me wonder, those solariums you see in movies set in days long ago, and the stories in books about people collecting rare plants. Maybe that’s still around today. Maybe there’s still a special niche, a sub-culture around collecting and growing special plants. It warms my heart to think that this once rarest of hobbies might be making its way into more peoples lives to enjoy a tiny piece of natural beauty in their own homes.
And secondly, it was fascinating to read about the economics of supply and demand and how non-linear it can be. Would I have believed it was somewhat common to spend a thousand dollars on a single propagated plant? No. But now that I’ve seen more of how this all works in concert, I can see it. The Holland tulip craze starts to make a little bit more sense.
And third, it turns out it’s not out of this world crazy to consider growing out one of these single leaf cutting plants that cost in the low three digits.
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