I popped out to the garden center yesterday with my mate as I decided to treat myself to a new plant.
I have very basic/intermediate knowledge on plant types and how to care for them but I'm not well educated in specific plant types and their variations. So I see a pretty Monstera on its own among some other plants. I've just managed to get to a point now with my current monstera where shes happy and thriving (massive victory for me lol) and i thought, hey why don't i treat myself to another. I noticed though on the pot it said £189.99…. i was like "ah clearly a ticket error when someone was pricing it up", i also noticed how the poor plant wasn't rooted well at all in the soil as well as lot of the leaves had started to brown and shrivel from poor care. (i mean the thing was literally just sat in the middle of some other random plants) so i was considering also asking if i could get the plant slightly discounted as I wasn't sure how healthy it was. I regret this LOL.
I go to the checkout and even the guy who served me also thought the price was a mistake, he entered in the product code and went quiet before turning to me and saying "apparently that is the price?" he grabbed his manager who came over and after a a few moments confirmed it was that price due to it being a very "rare" plant. He agreed with me after i pointed out it needed some TLC and kept it with him to have it get checked out i assume?
I've never come across anything like this (also extremely typical of me to pick up literally THE MOST expensive plant in the shop) and i thought i'd share the story here as A – it was quite funny and shocking but B – also i wanted to see if i could get some insight on this mysterious plant. Is it actually worth that much? What makes it so special? Or are the garden center seriously overcharging? Or did the manager guy lie so he could secretly steal the plant and take it home for himself hehe, im joking… I hope…
Plus does anyone actually own this magical plant? (does it have secret powers?) I'd love to see some photos of one fully grown and any fun info you have on it!
and for those of you wondering… no. I did not buy the nearly £200 plant. IN THIS ECONOMY!!?!??!
by Jedthehyperfixator
20 Comments
Some rare plants go for thousand of pounds, this really isn’t out of the norm for some variegated species. 200£ is not even that much for some established plants of less rare species, it can take years to grow them, so larger plants very easily reach prices in the several 100s£!
I’m not familiar with that specific kind but…in my opinion you paid too much.
I may have an unpopular opinion here, but any plant that is over $60 is overpriced and is a rip-off, especially considering they could die through no real fault of your own. I don’t care how ‘rare’ it is.
Could not imagine paying $350 for a plant, especially one that is in rougher shape. Sorry but that is ridiculous.
A few years ago cuttings of these and similar plants were literally $2k+ 😅 I’m thinking mainly of the variegated adansonii that people were freaking over
I have the advantage of being both cheap and patient. Once established most Monsteras grow quite quickly, so the high prices tend to be found on new cultivars. My simple theory is that a new cultivar will either drop dramatically in price within a few years or insist on reverting to its old form, in which case I don’t want it. On a related plant, when ZZ ‘Raven’ was first introduced it was expensive, but the color is stable and ZZs are quite easy to propagate so I waited a few years and picked one up for a reasonable price. Since I am a hobbyist and not a breeder or commercial grower I refuse to pay high prices for what will probably soon be a common plant.
“accidentally”
Once upon a time these were super hard to get and priced super high. I’ve seen P. Florida Beauties for under 50 bucks now. These require a lot of humidity and mine did well in the window that got early morning sunlight.
I accidentally broke the stem on my orchid, and this morning a new frond on my fern. I am NOT to be trusted with a £200 plant
Except this is not a monstera, but a Raphidophora Tetrasperma.
Return it.
When I first got into house plants, it was because of the pink princess philodendron craze going on during the pandemic.
At the time they were going for almost $1000 in some places.
I waited two months and picked one up at Home Depot for $12. And it turns out that I don’t like them anyway. They went bye bye this spring. One of the worst plants I’ve ever owned.
Chances are, there is somebody out there who is willing to give you a cutting from whatever plant you want, 90% of my plants are from gifted cuttings.
Shit, this is just typical small-retail overpricing. I would never pay that kind of money for a fast growing tropical. Try spending some time in the cactus hobby. I’ve seen ancient, endangered, extremely rare in cultivation, and horrifyingly slow growing copiapoa or astrophytum go for thousands.
I have a TC for one of these that I scored for free. I didn’t think it was that rare…
Yes, it is a rare plant, the price is not surprising
Aureas are the absolutely queens of crisp. My Thais and albos are absolutely glorious, aurea crisps with every new leaf. I wish you luck!
First I’ll start by saying that even the most common Monstera typically cost more than other common leafy houseplants of the same pot size. They aren’t terribly difficult to propagate, but they are slower to propagate and fragile to ship, so it’s necessary to charge more to cover for the inevitable losses.
Secondly, what makes any Monstera particularly rare? Simply being new on the market and having a different visual appearance than any of the others! Collectors and other growers will want them right away, and they will absolutely pay the extra $$$/£££ to be among the first to own them. These new variegated varieties are not grown from seeds, so every individual plant you find on the market had to be propagated from a leaf on an established plant. In some variegated varieties, the variegation isn’t uniform, and propagating from a sparsely variegated leaf might develop into a plant that isn’t showy enough to meet the expectations of consumers. It takes anywhere between a few years and a decade for any new variety to become widely available.
You found a plant that has very low availability, very high visual appeal, and is somewhat fragile to ship at that size… and those factors are reflected in the sticker price. If a buyer is particularly good at monstera culture, they could buy that specimen, nurse it back to health, and start propagating from it to create a small local supply, recovering the initial cost plus profit over the next year or so. It’s possible that the manager understands this… and wants to take advantage of the opportunity.
They’re like 20.00 at Walmart now
My brother was working on the southern US and randomly found an entire tree taken over by a white coloured monstera. It was wild to see
Well first thing is they have the name completely wrong on that label. It’s not a Minima. I’d bet, based on the size of those leaves, the price, and the way they’ve cut the browning bits back, that it’s a Monstera deliciosa “yellow Marylin”
Second, yes. Yellow Marylin is quite a pricey varigation mutation. It’s far from the most expensive – it’s come down a long way recently – but it’s still not what most sane people would call cheap.
It’s a readily available form but at the plant retailer I use, it’s listed at £275 ($368). That was actually quite a reasonable price really.
Third and last – yeah, plants can cost a lot. Like any collectors item, if someone values it enough, they’ll pay the price to get it. Once you reach a certain point of familiarity with plants, the risk of losing it to pests or care failure really does become negligible so making those pricey purchases is more realistic. You should see the prices in the cacti and tree world, compared to them the 5k monsteras that go to tissue culture labs are pennies.
I’ve paid more than this one for specific, very nice, specimens of species I’ve been after. Though I probably wouldn’t at a generic plant store. Nothing magic about them, they were simply specific species I wanted to add to my collection. Some have gone on to make me 5x that in cuttings, seeds etc etc etc too.
Mr Manager probably put it out back for a bit then back on the shelf. He likely didn’t want to have the conversation about discount – easier to just take it off the shelf until the customer has left, then put it back out for sale.
Interesting! First of all, this is NOT really a monstera. Still same family of plants (Araceae). But so are Photos and Philodendron to name a few popular plants. Official name would be Rhaphidophora tetrasperma. The fenestration is way less compared to a (fully grown) monstera deliciosa (no holes and double fenestration, just split leaves). I believe this is the reason they’re named monstera minima. It’s like a mini monstera.
Well, that said personally I would never spent so much on a “simple” houseplant. But if you really like it you can of course. It is a rare plant in the end.
But splitting up the plant will not cause it to lose the variegation as far as I know so in theory a well established plant can be split up and create a lot of new plants. So it might just be a matter of months when the market is overflooded with these plants and they will be worth way less. I think this happened to other ‘rare’ plants over the years.
The other problem with the leafs is the yellow parts will not do photosynthesis that well so it might require a lot of light and also may die if it has too much yellow variegation.
So beautiful