Stay Calm and Houseplant On
Plant obsessions are not the same thing as a passion for plants
Several years ago I had a large variegated Monstera Deliciosa sitting in a plastic pot out on my front lawn. It was quite large but a bit yellowed by the wind and sun. A customer asked me at the store if I had any such items and I said, sure, I have one at the moment sitting outside my house. I sold it for $65. The buyer was quite pleased.
A few years later, a nursery that had hundreds of baby Monsteras growing had one or two that came out variegated. They gave one to me, not for the low price of the normal Monsteras, but for free. ‘We’re not interested in variegated Monsteras,’ they said. We gave the plant away as well, as a ‘giveaway’ on Instagram.1
I like to tell stories like these to tease and torment those who find themselves in the death grip of houseplant obsession. 😥 Although I doubt plant lust is a new thing this century, there can be no doubt that it’s never been as lusty as it is today. As a grower and seller of houseplants — like the nursery owners who gave me a variegated Monstera for free — I get my ‘awesome plant fix’ by being around so many nice plants all the time. Even if I don’t keep them for long. So it’s easy for me to stand back and watch the feeding frenzy — and wonder.
A note to all Millennial houseplant lovers: ‘Stay Calm and Houseplant On’
Instead of obsession, cultivate a passion for plants
The website ‘plantaddicts.com’ is not really for houseplant addicts (it pre-dates that, and is a site for avid gardeners), but you could be forgiven for thinking it was. It’s often said that plants can improve your mental health. And they can. But as Jane Perrone explores in some of her houseplant podcasts, this is not necessarily the case. Sometimes it’s just the opposite. We need healthy habits when it comes to houseplants, and obsessions can run deep. This is true for most kinds of collecting — eg, wine, stamps, or vinyl records — except greater care is usually required in the case of plants — and plants grow, and have bugs. ‘It’s easy to let your leafy obsession tip over into a damaging habit that impacts your wellbeing,’ writes Perrone (see her website here and here for more on ‘plant hoarding’ and ‘plant addictions’).
Sometimes at MONSTERA we get new customers who have only just caught the plant bug. They arrive at the store with their bucket list. It reads like this: Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, Bugatti, Porsche. Not only do we not have these vintages, we tell them, but they probably couldn’t afford them if we did. If they could afford them, and we did have them, that would be great. But there would still be a small problem: plants are not cars. With plants you have to care for and maintain them yourself, and when the wheels fall off…
But there is an even larger issue here, namely, sustainability. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with being obsessed with houseplants, and plant collecting, it’s a dream that can’t last forever. Which is to say that, eventually the options for new plants will become so rare or so expensive that you’ll reach the end of the line. If in the meantime you develop an everyday passion for the everyday wonders of everyday houseplants, you’ll be fine. Indeed, you’ll be right here with the rest of us, getting satisfaction, not from the steady acquisition of new, spectacular specimens, but from taking care of plants, styling them, and watching them grow into real adults.
If you’re getting into houseplants, give up on the obsession for what’s trending or rare (such as unusual variegation and colours). Develop a passion for what’s common instead (namely, caring for, nurturing, and styling beautiful houseplants)
If your response to this attitude is no — never! — I understand. There are features of some plants that are irresistible: the patterns of some Begonias, the massive leaves of some Philodendrons, the foliage of Jewel Orchids, the velvet surfaces of some Anthuriums, or the pinks of some Calatheas and Stromanthes. These are all great compliments to a nice houseplant collection. But should they be the raison d'etre for having a collection. I don’t think so.
Gardening is synonymous with having a garden because so much of what it means to be a gardener has to do with engagement. A garden offers a lot of joy, but much of this joy comes from the activity of gardening itself. You might hire a gardener and avoid all the dirty work, but if so, you’ll never get the real satisfaction that gardening has to offer.
When we go indoors, the case is not quite the same, but there are similarities. Yes, we love how our plants are integrated into our home decor, bringing it literally to life. But plants are like everything else in the house: if we don’t engage with those things, our passive relationship turns them into static objects, turning everything into a kind of wallpaper. To keep plants alive, both in terms of their life and yours, you have to engage with them. And it is this engagement that offers the fullest rewards of indoor gardening, regardless of how rare or exotic your plants are.
The plant in the Instagram post shown below is quite impressive, but it’s a pretty ordinary houseplant species. What makes it special is it maturity and its condition. As I always say, your least favourite houseplant in perfect condition will always look better than your most favourite in poor condition. This reinforces the point above, that underlying any beautiful plant collection is loving care by the person looking after them.
Love fades
Here’s a thought experiment: imagine someone was given their first houseplant and is really enjoying taking care of it, and watching it grow. They arrive at a plant store ready to buy several additional plants, but have little or no knowledge of what are the ones more sought-after. What do you think will happen? Disregarding the price, will the variegated Monstera out-compete the Marble Queen Scindapsus? Will the Watermelon Peperomia fade next to a shimmering Anthurium Crystallinum. Or will a Ficus Black Knight stand up to a Ficus Shivereana?
To truth is, this situation happens everyday in a houseplant store, where we find two kinds of customers: those in the majority who are keen to put nice plants in their home, and others in the minority who are looking for new and interesting plants to add to their collection. On the surface these two groups might appear to be the same, but they are in fact quite different. Obviously, it’s the former group that’s represented in the thought experiment above. If you’re in that group, you’ll know that, generally speaking, the naïve or average plant buyer doesn’t give a hoot about what’s fashionable, even if it’s a Pink Princess, a Crimson Queen, or a Cebu Blue Pothos. They like what they like, with little concern over what’s newly on the market or what’s trending on Instagram.
Now if you happen to find yourself in the second category, not to worry, you’re in good company. Few of us are immune to the desire of wanting something new, beautiful, and interesting. A lawn is one thing, but who wants a whole field of identical looking plants in their house. Sometimes the only problem is the wait; which is to say, if you don’t wait you pay too much.
In the image below, Thai Constellation Monsteras are shown in Australia at $295 — a year earlier they were almost twice that amount. I love the oxymoron of dozens of nearly identical plants being sold in a hardware store under the heading: ‘Extremely Rare.’ They’re not lying, though. The ‘Thai Constellation’ is to houseplants what DeBeers is to diamonds. Because only one company has successfully lab-grown a variegated Monstera Deliciosa, they intentionally limit the numbers they release so as to keep the price ‘artificially’ high. With a 40-percent drop in price after one year, you can see why. More importantly, you can see that price has little to do with the plant being rare in any natural sense. In fact, the ‘Thai Constellation” emerged as a tissue-culture ‘sport’ in a laboratory, so it doesn’t even exist in nature as a wild plant.2
But the ‘Thai Constellation’ is the exception more than the rule. Since most plants can be acquired from many sources, new entries on the market have no mechanism by which to keep up their inflated price. Which means that the wait is worth the wait. We want to think that price is an indication of the value of a plant, which reinforces our belief that what we’re buying is somehow special or rare. Unless it is truely rare (which, as the word suggests, is quite rare), this won’t hold true.
In the last two years in NZ, for instance, almost a dozen new varieties have appeared via tissue culture that were otherwise rare or expensive because they didn’t exist, or only came from cuttings. Varieties of Ficus Elastica (Ruby, Tineke) and some Philodendrons (Birkin, Micans) are examples. One minute a plant’s relatively ‘rare,’ fetching high prices, only to turn up months later on sale cheap at the local garden centre, or even at the supermarket (e.g., Ficus Tineke, Watermelon Peperomia).
Consider the two charts below. The first is a wholesale trade-list from a NZ plant nursery. Notice something odd? Yes, one Syngonium cultivar is almost 5 times more expensive than the others. It’s so expensive, in fact, that the company highlights the price in red as a warning to their retailers. This ‘exclusive’ price reflects the fact that the plant is ‘new’ to the NZ market, and the nursery is only too happy to let the economics of supply and demand determine the price; i.e., milk it while it’s hot (the cultivation of this plant actually dates back to 2003, so it’s hardly new).3 These same economics are revealed further in the next image, from only a few week’s later. Now the price is 20 percent less. This will continue on until, in almost no time, this variety is the same price as the others. As goes desire, so goes demand, and then price.
There is of course nothing wrong with charging more for something that’s in demand. In fact, my point is not about selling plants. I’m more interested in what these prices tell us about plant fashions, the bottom line being this: stay calm, carry on, and wait for the price to drop. It usually will, and if it doesn’t, get a baby version or a cutting.
If you look at your plants, thinking back to the pleasure you received when acquiring each one, I think you’ll see a pattern. What was once new is now not so new. Eventually each plant becomes more-or-less like all the others: familiar. And those that don’t, those that, for whatever reason, keep your fancy, those are the special ones, whether rare, exotic, or not. If this is your experience, you can see why there’s no reason to rush in and buy.
Below is an image of one of my favourite plants: the Monstera Standleyana. I never understood why they were never a sensation in the houseplant world. Imagine, though, if they were. Imagine someone found one in a tropical jungle, never seen before, and gave it to you. It would be so special and so rare. You would cherish it. You would show everyone. But it would still be just a Monstera Standleyana. Think about it.
In more recent years, such a casual approach to selling unusual plants has withered. Nowadays, as I quickly learned, if you sell a prized plant cheaply, you get stung by buyers chopping them up and selling them for many times the original price. From a seller’s point of view, you can’t prevent such behaviour, so you end up charging the going rate.
Maybe someday someone will plant some ‘Thai Constellation’ Monsteras in the wild so that someone will discover them later as wild plants.
This Syngonium shows a naturally-occurring plant mutation of the Syngonium podophyllum cultivar Regina Red, discovered and selected in 2003 from within a population of Regina Red.