The seller messaged me a photo at eleven on a Tuesday night: a half-grown Anthurium that looked like papillilaminum crossed with something paler, broader, with a quilted lamina and a peduncle that flushed wine-red in the light. No tag. No paperwork. The mother plant had come, he said, from a Panamanian collector who died in 2019, and the only other person he knew of growing the same cross had lost theirs in a heatwave the previous summer. He wanted a number. He wanted it that week.
I have done this enough times now to know the panic that comes next isn't really about money. It's about the absence of a ladder. When you sell a Monstera deliciosa 'Thai Constellation' you can look at four marketplaces and a closed auction or two and triangulate inside an hour. When you sell something nobody else has, there is no ladder. You have to build one out of whatever wood is around, and then convince a buyer to climb it with you.