BackForget the stock market. The rare-plant market has gone bonkers
Demand jumps for unusual greenery, attracting plant flippers and thieves; ‘it’s gotten out of control’
PremiumThe 1600s had the Dutch tulip market bubble. Now 2020 is doing the same for rare plants.
Interest in greenery has grown during the pandemic, with more people stuck at home and bored—and Instagram posts have helped send the market for unusual varieties into a tizzy. Growers, nurseries and plant shops are scrambling to keep up. The most coveted flora now fetch thousands of dollars. Plant flippers have jumped in to make a quick buck.
Jerry Garcia, a 27-year-old aircraft mechanic in San Diego, said in recent months he has been besieged by requests from people eager to buy a piece of his vast tropical-plants collection. During one week in August, he sold two small cuttings of a highly coveted Variegated Monstera Adansonii plant for $2,000 a piece. With proper care, the cuttings will eventually turn into plants.
“It’s better than the stock market," Mr. Garcia said. “I got a bunch of these plants when they were in the double digits, and now they are in the four-digit realm."
Enid Offolter, a grower who runs NSE Tropicals in Plantation, Fla., figured that a sharp downturn in business would follow coronavirus lockdowns. Instead, she’s working 12-hour days, seven days a week, to meet the highest volume of orders she’s had in two decades in the industry.
On Labor Day, Ms. Offolter listed 300 young plants of different types, including some rare ones, for sale online; the entire batch sold out in seven minutes. She recently sold a Variegated Monstera Adansonii for $3,500. “Nothing’s making sense anymore," she said. “It’s gotten out of control."
Flora with sought-after features, such as splashes of color and holes in their leaves, are often the result of genetic mutations that make them susceptible to minor changes in temperature, humidity and light, plant experts say.
The ghostly white streaks of the Variegated Monstera Albo can send prices up to $250 per leaf. Those same colorless patches, however, mean the plant has trouble photosynthesizing and often requires extra help from humidifiers or grow lights.
Stella Barnum, a plant buyer for Urban Sprouts in Renton, Wash., said she sees a lot of newbies snapping up ultraexpensive plants, which quickly shrivel and die. “I would rather pay my mortgage than throw money away like that," she said.
Longtime plant lovers say the craze for rare plants is reminiscent of a housing bubble, or the tulip mania that gripped the Netherlands during the 1600s, when bulb prices hit stratospheric heights before crashing.
“It’s going to burst at some point," said Ms. Barnum. “It’s too crazy."
Botany bandits are interested, too. A few months ago, Mr. Garcia, the San Diego collector, began noticing that valuable plants were disappearing from his rented greenhouse. He set up motion-activated cameras to figure out what was happening. Those gadgets began vanishing as well.
Mr. Garcia almost did a stakeout in a hammock, but decided to splurge instead on a camera that sent live footage to his phone. It caught a man, toting a gun, making off with thousands of dollars worth of plants.
“This man was picking up plants as if he was shopping at a nursery," said Mr. Garcia, who quickly moved his collection back home.
Collectors Nick Watchorn and Lani Dy have installed cameras both inside and outside their house near Portland, Ore. In recent months, the couple has sold off thousands of dollars’ worth of cuttings and plants from their trove of greenery collected over the years. “Now we can get 10 times what we paid," Ms. Dy said.
Among recent sales: $4,990 for a four-leaf Variegated Monstera Adansonii, whose prominent features include holes in the leaves and streaks of color; $2,800 for a cutting of the same variety with one leaf; and $1,250 for a cutting of a Monstera Obliqua Peruvian with one leaf and a root.
Collectors who have made a little cash by chopping off a stem here, a leaf there, said part of the appeal is that plants can rejuvenate themselves over time.
“Does your Chanel handbag grow another Chanel handbag in a month?" said Lily Liu, who works in biotech in Oakland, Calif. The 30-year-old said she’s sold a handful of cuttings to people in her area, and befriended some other plant-obsessed people in the process.
Kaboo Bill, a wedding photographer in Sacramento, Calif., said she got the idea for flipping plants after she started buying some for herself while sheltering in place. She has been able to import $500 worth of rare varieties from Thailand or Indonesia, chop them into multiple plants, and sell the whole load for triple the amount, she said.
“It’s definitely an obsession now," said Mrs. Bill, 39. She built a greenhouse in her backyard to house the hundreds of plants she’s recently acquired.
Mrs. Bill said she’s made a few thousand dollars so far. Part of the lure of flipping, she said, is the thrill of gambling on living things that can die before being sold off. She recently paid $500 to buy “the saddest cutting" of a sought-after variety—essentially a stem with no leaf and a tiny root. Similar cuttings have been priced at $1,200, she said, so it was a bargain.
“It was scary," she said. “I took the risk. If it dies it’s $500 down the drain. But if it survives, that’s $2,000."
This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.
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