The hype for rare plants is driven almost entirely by social media. According to the National Gardening Association, houseplant sales have grown by 50 percent in the past 3 years. It’s now a billion-dollar industry, and an increasing share takes place online.
Plants that weren’t rare before ( such as the Philodendron Pink Princess) are now in high demand. The incredible hype around rare plants has also attracted its fair share of poachers, thieves, and grifters. And then there are sellers who invent their own kinds of magnificent plants, like the Pink Congo.
We have plantfluensers popping up on social media sharing their plant collections, one rare plant after the other, creating a magnificent appetite for rare and visually striking plants. Some of the really popular ones are the variegated plants with their colorful leaves.
Variegation is a cell mutation which occurs rarely in nature, where variation in leaf color arises because of a lack of the green pigment chlorophyll in some of the plant cells leaving the leaves white, yellow and even pink.
One of these plants is the highly sought-after Philodendron Pink Princess, a plant that has big sectoral chunks of pink variegation. This plant sells for $100–150, which is an insane amount of money for some leaves and a root. However, this plant is the real deal. If people are willing to pay this amount of money for their Pink Princess, they do get a plant that will continue to produce pink variegation as it continues to grow.
Somewhere during this craze for the Philodendron Pink Princess another similar plant entered the market: the Philodendron Pink Congo. This plant is different from the Pink Princess in that its leaves are either fully pink or fully green. This plant is sold for around $170 (this price is for a plant with 5 leaves) with the understanding that this is a new variegated form of philodendron and that this plant will continue to produce pink leaves. The issue is that the Pink Congo is not real. It is not a real variegated plant. A gas similar to that of the gases used in the supermarkets to turn green tomatoes red is used to make the leaves on this plant turn pink. This means that the plant will never grow another pink leaf and the pink leaves on the plant will also revert back to green within 6–12 months.
The plant is still circulating social media keeping the buzz alive. Some sellers are aware of this issue and some are not. However, many sellers keep selling these plants without disclaimers or with disclaimers in tiny letters so that the buyer wont read it. Sellers should lower the price of the plants with a clear disclaimer or simply stop selling them.
