In the summer of 2021, a four-leaf cutting of Philodendron spiritus-sancti went for the price of a used Honda. Screenshots flew through DMs like contraband. A man in suburban New Jersey, who two years earlier had been growing pothos under a shop light, posted a stud cutting of Anthurium papillilaminum × luxurians and woke to ninety-seven offers. Somebody in Bali was airmailing wet-stick Monstera obliqua Peru inside hollowed-out books. The whole thing had the manic, slightly embarrassed energy of a casino at four in the morning.
Three years on, the room is quieter. Prices on the showpieces have dropped sixty, seventy, in some cases ninety percent. The flippers are gone — to mushrooms, to orchids, to whatever the algorithm rewards next. What remains is something more interesting than the boom itself: the people who were going to grow these plants anyway, methodically, in spare bedrooms and converted garages, long after the speculation washed out.