The first rare plant I ever sold was a two-node cutting of Philodendron verrucosum, the Ecuadorian form with the bristled red petioles and the deep emerald blades that look black until the sun catches them. It was rooted in a deli cup of sphagnum, two new leaves the size of guitar picks, and I had no idea what to charge for it. I remember weighing it on the kitchen scale like that would tell me something. It weighed 38 grams. I wrote the listing three times.
I settled on $85, which felt obscene at the time and now reads, six years later, like a small act of self-sabotage. The buyer was a woman in Vermont who messaged me twice to confirm the cutting would survive the cold pack. It did. She sent a photo of the first leaf to harden off in her grow tent — already bigger than anything on the mother plant — and I sat with my coffee and understood, dimly, that I had just learned the first real lesson of the trade: I had priced a plant, not a relationship, not a risk, not a future.