In late 2021, a friend in Quezon City sent me a phone video of a Anthurium papillilaminum seedling — four leaves, a thumb-sized root ball, the velvet still adolescent — and told me, half-laughing, that someone in Bangkok had wired him the equivalent of a used motorcycle for it. He wasn't bragging. He sounded a little spooked. The plant left his house the next morning in a courier bag lined with damp sphagnum, and within a week he'd sold three more at numbers that, two years earlier, would have bought a mature specimen with provenance and a tag.
By the spring of 2024, that same grower was selling papillilaminum seedlings for roughly a fifth of the 2021 peak, and the Bangkok buyer had stopped answering messages. Nothing had changed about the plant. The leaves still pulled down to the substrate in that slow, heavy way velvet anthuriums do. The veins still silvered in raking light. What had changed was everyone around it.