The box arrives on a Tuesday, usually, because someone in Florida or Long Beach has timed the inspection right. You cut the tape and the smell hits first — wet kraft paper, a faint vinegar tang from stressed tissue, the green-mineral note of fresh sphagnum. Inside, swaddled in damp moss and newsprint, are three bare-root cuttings of Anthurium papillilaminum, a single-node Philodendron spiritus-sancti, and a leafless rhizome chunk that was sold to you as Anthurium dressleri and may or may not be. You have maybe twenty minutes of adrenaline before the responsible part of your brain catches up.
Everyone obsesses over the purchase. The acclimation is where collectors actually lose plants. The first sixty days after import — when the roots are compromised, the leaves are running on stored sugar, and the plant is trying to read a new climate through closed stomata — decide whether you keep a $400 cutting or compost it in March. What follows is the protocol I've settled on after a decade of imports from Ecuador, Indonesia, and Thailand, and the reasoning behind each step.