The first thing I noticed at Marcos's place outside Pereira was the sound: a low, constant hush of misters cycling on a relay, and underneath that, the tick of condensation falling from polycarbonate onto banana leaves on the floor. He had told me on WhatsApp that his Anthurium luxurians stock was "doing well." Standing in front of the bench, I understood that "doing well" had meant something I could not have guessed from a phone — six mother plants in twenty-gallon nursery pots, each with three or four bullate leaves the size of a dinner plate, the newest still bronze and not yet hardened.
I had bought from Marcos twice before without meeting him. The plants had arrived bare-root in sphagnum, healthy, fairly priced. I thought I knew who he was. I did not. Ten minutes inside his shade house rewrote a year of assumptions — about him, about his pricing, about which of his plants I actually wanted, and about how much of this hobby is being conducted, badly, through a small glowing rectangle.