Bidding wars and $1,000 succulents: The wild world of rare houseplants

In June 2021, a white variegated Rhaphidophora tetrasperma with eight leaves and a ninth just unfurling, sold for NZ$30,924 on a New Zealand auction site.

Two anonymous buyers, “foliage_patch” and “meridianlamb,” drove the price up in the last four minutes of bidding, with meridianlamb eventually claiming the green prize.

While the average collector might not be willing to spend that much, the stunning bid reflects the soaring popularity of houseplants – and the heightened interest in spending top dollar on status varieties, thanks in large part to social media. The particularly photogenic philodendron pink princess, for example (which is as Pepto-hued as it sounds), became a darling of Instagram and can now cost hundreds of dollars. According to the National Gardening Association, sales of houseplants and accessories surpassed $2 billion in the United States in 2021.

Serious collectors sleuth online for hard-to-find species and travel around the country to auctions and plant shows. The hunt is part of the draw, they say, but so is the community they’ve found among fellow plant people and the act of nurturing something rare and beautiful.

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Rick Hawkins, president of the Palm Beach Palm and Cycad Society in Florida, said he’s willing to spend $350 on a single plant or just a cutting or small section of stem without any roots, if it is “a rare philodendron or a really nice anthurium.” Hawkins said, “I always had a top budget but over time it has begun to creep upwards,” along with his interest in more exotic species.

He started in college with a “super basic pothos.” Today, though, Hawkins prefers palms because of their warm weather feel: “I always liked the tropics and hated winter. I like palms’ tropical look.” He has almost 200 different types including a Coccothrinax crinita, known as an “old man palm” for its beardlike, furry trunk.

Much of Hawkins’ collection has come from the auction circuit in Florida, where he’s met collectors from as far away as California, Ohio, New York and Tennessee. “There are two different types of auctions – one kind is very friendly and is usually at someone’s house,” Hawkins said, while the other often takes place at a botanical garden or auditorium space and can “get quite competitive and bid up the plants quite a bit.” Hawkins attended one such auction earlier this spring and said the competition for a slow-growing type of croton with 15 orange leaves became so intense that the two final bidders decided to split it.

“It depends on the plant,” he explained, “but once it hits around $150, you’ll hear talk of propagating” – the process by which a new plant can grow from the original by way of cutting.

Enid Offolter, owner and founder of NSE Tropicals plant nursery in Florida, which has one of the largest collections of aroid plants in the United States, has bought at auctions in the past, but said they have lately become “untouchable” for her because of the exorbitant prices. “I’ve seen people spend multiple thousands of dollars on one plant that used to be $20,” she said.

Her personal ceiling: “A couple of hundred.”

Ashley Bruschi, 34, who posts her rare succulent collection on Instagram as @ambsucculents, hasn’t been to an auction but said she has seen “crazy stuff at flower shows – people spend tens of thousands of dollars.” Her own biggest splurge was a spiky, 10-year-old agave white rhino, which set her back $1,000. “I had never seen one that size and that nice before,” said Bruschi, adding, “I get bad FOMO if I miss out on a nice specimen.”

The largest and most established flower show in the United States – the Philadelphia Flower Show – happens to be in Bruschi’s city. It attracts some 250,000 people each March. “I thought I was spending a lot on plants,” Bruschi said, laughing, “but people who have a lot of money are able to attain whatever they want.”

In 2020, Bruschi opened a plant store on Etsy to help support her hobby. “I started selling my propagations and reinvesting everything I made back into plants, and it snowballed from there,” she said. The following year, she converted her attic into a makeshift greenhouse to accommodate her 500-plus succulents, which she spends “several hours a day, pruning, watering, cleaning, potting.”

There are only so many flower shows, so Bruschi buys most of her plants online, sometimes importing them from Europe and Asia, which isn’t without risk. Scammers, she said, are an unfortunate part of the online plant world: “Plant people are very trusting. . . . People take advantage.” She recounts how she was led on for months about an order of Brighamia insignis (also known as Vulcan palms) before finally realizing they were never coming.

Indeed, the booming popularity of houseplants, particularly among younger adults who got into them during the isolated days of covid, has created huge new demand (and presumably new opportunity for scammers). Longtime houseplant suppliers have had trouble keeping up. Offolter, 52, was ahead of the curve when she made a website for NSE Tropicals in the late ’90s, but nothing prepared her for the surge in online sales during the pandemic. “I didn’t have thousands of anything, and a thousand people wanted the same plant,” she recalls, “I was like, ‘I have two.'”

Today, TikTok’s #PlantTok boasts 4.5 billion views among thousands of accounts. One of them is 29-year-old Reagan Kastner, or @reagankastner, whose home and garden hack videos have a combined 2.7 million likes. She used to run a company in Portland, Ore. that tended to large-scale “plantscapes” in hotel lobbies and corporate settings, but covid-19 changed that. “I lost most of my clients,” she said. “They let all their plants die during the pandemic. It was really sad.” So, she found a new line of work as a plant influencer. Kastner said her personal collection is ever-changing, but you can see all 100 or so featured on her socials. “And I’ve downsized,” she adds.

Social media, say all the collectors we interviewed, is the key to turning an obscure variety into an “it” plant. “The photos are gorgeous and stylized and here is this beautiful, dream living room and there is a big, beautiful monstera,” said Offolter. “It is selling a dream.” Variegated plants with leaves that are more than one color are having their “it” moment right now, the collectors say. Some have big white patches mixed with green; others, like the philodendron pink princess, are swirled with vibrant pink.

Bruschi and Kastner explained that the unique chemical trait that makes the foliage so distinctly multihued, also makes these varieties harder to propagate. “When sellers can’t propagate the plant fast enough, the price goes up,” said Bruschi. Et voilà.

Next on Bruschi’s wish list? A thorny, climbing species called Adenia globosa. “But they’re from Africa,” she explained, “so it is impossible to find ones that aren’t poached [or] seed grown, and are a nice size.” The hunt continues.