I’m thinking about buying a baby Monstera mint to save money… but I’m struggling with one thing 🤔
At this stage, can you actually tell what it will become?
Looking at these types:
Plant A → mint tissue culture / White Monster type?
Plant B → Full Mint
Plant C → Jungle Mint
They look quite different when mature… but as baby plants, they often look almost the same.
These baby ones are all labeled as mint.
So my question is:
👉 When they’re still small, is there any reliable way to tell which one will grow into something closer to Jungle Mint vs Full Mint vs White Monster type?
Or…
👉 Are most baby “mints” basically the same (unselected tissue culture), and it’s just a gamble how they develop?
I’d love to go the cheaper route with baby plants, but not sure if I’m missing something obvious when choosing them.
Curious to hear your experiences — were you able to predict it early, or did it completely surprise you later?
by di0g0h
2 Comments
I think most baby plants are full tc and will develop more or less like plant B. If you want one of the others it’s probably best to get a cutting from an established plant if you can find one
so different cultivars have different traits that make them that cultivar. plant a is bulbasaur, plant b is white monster/mint/full mint/tc mint, and plant c is jungle mint. plant b is the one that causes the most confusion, because it can display tons of different mint patterns and its a combination of random and genes that results in it getting a lot of nicknames.
as babies, they are indeed hard to tell apart, although baby 2 is definitely a bulbasaur. they arent tissue cultures from the same plant that could become one of the three cultivars you listed, but that doesnt mean theyre labelled or marketed correctly. a bulbasaur tissue culture has to come from a bulbasaur mother plant, a white monster tissue culture has to come from a white monster mother plant, and a jungle mint tissue culture has to come from a jungle mint mother plant.
when theyre young, youre taking a gamble not because you dont know which it will grow up to be, but because you dont know if the seller knows what theyre selling or if theyre lying to you. there isnt a reliable way to distinguish white monster from jungle mint in particular because jungle mints are defined by their deep fenestrations. the splotchy mint pattern can show up in both plants so you have to grow them to their second fenestrations to really know what youve got.
these problems would typically be solved by consulting the international aroid society database which has some of the best information on cultivars around, buttttt their website has been broken for years and while i think they recently brought in a web developer to fix it, at the moment their database is still down so you cant reference it