Outside, it is February. The temperature in Minneapolis has been below zero for eleven days. Inside a spare bedroom on the third floor of a bungalow near Lake Harriet, a Philodendron gloriosum is unfurling a new leaf. The emerging lamina is already bigger than a man's hand, white veins threading across a matte green that looks almost hand-stitched. The grower, a pediatric nurse named Sara, has lined the walls with two layers of foam insulation and installed a secondary heating circuit so the room never drops below 68°F. She runs a humidifier that moves twelve gallons of water into the air each day. She checks the substrate temperature with a probe before every water. 'It doesn't know it's in Minnesota,' she says. That is precisely the point.
What Sara is doing — and what tens of thousands of collectors are doing in apartments in Chicago, converted garages in Denver, basement grow tents in Glasgow — is essentially an act of controlled deception. The plants, species that evolved in the cloud forests of Ecuador and Colombia, the lowland rainforests of Borneo, the tepuis of Venezuela, have no idea they are somewhere they were never meant to be. Their entire evolutionary history says: high humidity, stable warmth, dappled equatorial light, and a substrate that drains in seconds. The collector's job is to reproduce all four, simultaneously, in a structure designed for human beings. It is, by any objective measure, absurd. It is also, for those who do it, completely necessary.