The tropical plant collector propagating rare plants en masse | My Garden Path | Gardening Australia

Sometimes a cultural connection to collecting and cultivating plants runs in a family, as is the case for Dexter Burgos and his family, who have an enviable collection of rare indoor plants in their Perth home. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe
Dexter is a passionate plantsman who moved to Perth from the Philippines ten years ago. He found himself missing the lush tropical plants that grow naturally there. Living close to plants in the home and city was innate to him with his deep family roots in the plant industry; his father is an agronomist, his mother is a soil scientist, and his family in the Philippines runs a nursery business. They always collected plants in his family, so he caught the bug and wanted to expand his collection of tropical plants. His wife, Ruby, is a plant pathologist and moved to Perth with their two children five years after Dexter.

Dexter started using his family connections to the nursery industry in the Philippines and SE Asia to import plants for his own home to Perth. He quickly amassed a collection of plants that were impossible to find in Perth. Unfortunately, Perth’s only quarantine facility was closed in June 2021 due to the pandemic.

Dexter and Ruby responded to the closing of quarantine in WA impacting their import of plants by beginning to perform tissue culture at home in late 2021. Tissue culture is a method of multiplying cells from a plant to produce exact clones. You can produce hundreds to thousands of plants at once, all genetically identical. “This is the most common way that big retailers and nurseries propagate indoor and tropical plants commercially, and we are demystifying the process and putting it in the hands of home horticulturalists.” If a small home nursery can do it, they can focus on making available plants that would otherwise be out of reach of Perth plant people, only available to the wealthiest and most specialized collectors. This technique allows them to pick plants they love and bring them to the Perth market, rather than relying on big box suppliers.

However, TC is expensive and laborious to set up initially and acquire tech. Performing and perfecting the techniques takes a huge amount of time and resources. Everything must be extremely sterile, as bacteria and mold thrive in the agar plates that plants are grown in and will overtake the environment if present. Luckily, they have a background in this kind of lab work and have set up a lab in their lounge room, where they are able to propagate heaps of rare tropical plants at scale.

Dexter’s unicorn plant was a variegated Philodendron billietiae, and being able to grow this at home and then bring it to the homes of other plant collectors is the heart of why he loves this business. He is a collector’s collector, and loves sharing this feeling with other plant people in Perth. It is also a way to share his culture, being able to centre his family life in Australia around the same things he grew up with. “It’s common in the Philippines to have plants in your home. Having moved with my family to an unfamiliar country, it helps them connect to their roots. It’s a way for my children to relate to their culture back home and ensure that they can help their grandparents when they return.”

Featured Plants:
Philodendron billietiae ‘Variegated’ 
Philodendron ‘Florida Beauty’ 
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