Editorial

Jo McCarroll reflects on plant crazes… both current and historic.

Iassume you know that houseplants are rather on trend right now because quite often there’s another headline about some rare indoor plant selling online for an improbable amount of money. In January last year, a variegated monstera went for $5000. In June, a variegated hoya sold for $6500. Then last August a Philodendron ‘Minima’ set a new record, going for $8150. But all of those sounds like quite a bargain when you think that in June this year a variegated Rhaphidophora tetrasperma sold for $27,100. According to those data points, the prices for rare house plants have increased by 442 per cent over a year and a bit. I looked it up, and over about the same time house prices across New Zealand increased by about 20 per cent, so you absolutely would have been better off putting your money into rare indoor plants with variegated foliage.

I was round at plant breeder Dr Keith Hammett’s place the other day and we were talking about “plant crazes”: when some genus or particular kind of plant – even in this case a specific variety, since we were talking about the exponential rise in demand for the Dahlia ‘Cafe au Lait’ – becomes the absolute must-grow and everyone suddenly wants it, so people who have it can raise their prices.

“The thing is,” Keith said, rather wryly. “We’ve seen this all before.” And it’s true that plants have come – spectacularly, rapidly – in and out of fashion in the past. The example everyone knows about is tulipmania; when, in the 1630s, the entirety of Dutch society suddenly went mad for exotic “broken” tulips with striped or speckled flowers (the striated patterns of which, as we now know, were actually the result of a virus).

But that’s by no means the only plant craze of the past. Young Victorian women were afflicted by pteridomania, or fern fever, and collected and traded in pressed ferns, the rarest of which passed hands for some serious coin. The Victorians too were prone to what was called orchidelirium, when the rich and fancy funded perilous expeditions to collect new plant material (and I do mean perilous, in 1901 a botanist in search of Phalaenopsis in the Philippines was eaten by a tiger).

These botanical manias have happened in New Zealand before too. When I was going through NZ Gardener archives to put together a story marking our 75th anniversary a couple of years ago, there were occasional reports of an exponentially increasing demand for certain plants (in the 1990s it was cottage flowers; in the 1980s, herbs; in the 1970s, roses; and in the 1960s, it was – make of this what you will – houseplants.)

I was talking to the Auckland plantsman Graham Milne the other day who said, having been passionate about indoor flora for a while now (66 years in fact, since he was given his first begonia at nine), it was absolutely clear that fashions in plants “change all the time”. Not that long ago, he told me, an acquaintance of his passed away, leaving behind her collection of hoya. “Some of the rarest and most spectacular stuff you can imagine,” he told me. “But when she died, the estate just couldn’t get rid of it. Some of it was dumped, the rest was given away. Now it could be sold for thousands of dollars a plant!”

But Graeme was fairly philosophical about trends coming and going. People had always spent money on what they wanted, he said, and it was great to see new enthusiasts finding out how interesting plants could be.

I feel the same actually. I think watching a plant, any plant, grow and flourish under your care is a wonderful thing. So it’s wonderful to see the passion and enthusiasm people have for houseplants right now. Because I believe that an interest in plants enriches your life in every way that matters.