In March, a lady posted a message on the forum “Am I The Asshole?” [“ C’est moi le connard ?”] from the Reddit platform to recount a conflict with her 14-year-old niece – niece she never wanted to see again in her life and who she had told to go and burn in hell. His crime: plant theft.
The lady had to be away for a fortnight and she had asked her niece to take care of her precious collection of 35 indoor plants. In exchange for which she would donate some cuttings. When she returned, she found a massacre. All of the potted creatures had been given a drastic cut, some shrunk by half. Its blue pothos, its Rowley ragwort, its Othonna capensis Ruby Necklace, her philodendron brandtianum, her golden pothos (an ivy she had taught to climb the stairs)… All decimated. The niece had taken her cuttings in advance. She hadn’t gone too far with the pruning shears.
The jewels of her collection were in even worse condition: the Pink Princess philodendron was reduced to two leaves, and the Monstera either only had three left.
Instagram stars
The lady collapsed, she cried, fumed, yelled at her niece – who had already sold most of the cuttings. To an outside observer, the answer to the forum question was obvious. Of course this lady was the bad guy: her niece was 14, she had just made a mistake; and then, they were only plants.
The green-fingered commentators, on the other hand, disagreed: the niece had been caught red-handed. Several of these plants were worth hundreds of pounds. the Monstera or, for example, is the plant of the moment on Instagram. Its value has risen as much in the past two years as that of cryptocurrencies. A cutting can reach thousands of pounds. It wasn’t a mistake, it was theft.
Consult a lawyer, advised Internet users. File a complaint. “Hell, it would still be too good for her”, wrote one of them. They voted: no, the lady was not a bitch.
Up to $40,000 per plant
People have been stealing plants for as long as they’ve been growing. Victorian botanist adventurers fueled a global plant race as exotic gardens became a symbol of high society at home.
Today, Brexit, the pandemic and social media have created the perfect conditions for the crisis. Garden centers that closed in 2020 [pour cause de pandémie], the Dutch – who produce houseplants in huge high-tech greenhouses – have stopped production, causing a global shortage. At the same time, the demand for indoor plants has exploded. Brexit has pushed prices up, and the energy crisis looks set to drive them up further.
All this will probably only add to the interest they arouse. Showing a rare or cherished species on Instagram has a name: the plant flexing [de muscle flexing, qui signifie “montrer ses muscles”]. Rare plants that sold for less than 100 pounds [environ 117 euros] two or three years ago are now snapping up thousands of pounds at online auctions. Last year, a New Zealander made headlines by selling a small eight-leafed plant of Rhaphidophora tetrasperma, also called Monstera minima, for 14,000 pounds [environ 16 000 euros]. The newspapers talked about “record sale”, but several insiders have told me that they have seen plants sell for double.
“I’ve heard some very respectable growers say they charge $40,000 minimum for some of their strains, says Tyler Thrasher, an American nurseryman who presents a successful podcast titled Greenhouse Rants. This is usually because these plants will then end up in a plant tissue culture laboratory, where they can generate millions of specimens in two or three years.”
Botanical gardens plundered with pruning shears
As with anything valuable, the value of a plant is a function of its rarity. Take one of the most popular, the Monstera either. Its value is due to the variegations, these unique white marks that dot its leaves. The probability that a Monstera ordinary (which can be obtained for 19 pounds at Ikea) develops variegations as soon as it germinates is about 1 in 100,000. This does not prevent some from selling “seeds of Monstera variegata”, the magic bean of indoor gardening.
It’s not uncommon for the best-looking specimens on Instagram – those with half-moon leaves split between pure green and snow white – to go for £10,000 [près de 11 800 euros] on eBay, Etsy and Facebook Marketplace. Cuttings – which are the only reliable way to get a Monstera either – amount to hundreds or even thousands of pounds. Incidentally, the result is not guaranteed: nature sometimes causes the cuttings of a mottled plant to produce