The box arrived on a Tuesday in February, the kind of cold morning where you bring plants inside the door before the driver's truck has even pulled away. Inside, double-boxed, were two Anthurium papillilaminum seedlings from a small grower in central Florida I'll call M. The sphagnum was barely damp. The root systems were intact — not just present, but architecturally intact, with feeder roots fanning out the way they do when a plant has been potted once and left to settle. There was a handwritten note clipped to the invoice. It listed the mother plant by accession number and said, in pencil: slightly bullate form, F2, selfed Sept 2022.
I have bought plants from maybe forty growers over the last decade. I trust four of them without hesitation. M is the one I trust most, and I have spent some time trying to articulate why, because the answer is not the obvious one. It is not that his plants are the cheapest, or the rarest, or the showiest on Instagram. It is something more boring, and more important, and worth writing down.