How plants are the new millennial craze

At the Annual Aroid Society Show and Sale, greenery lovers are on the hunt, and specialised plants are sold for thousands of dollars, writes Gray Chapman

Aroids have surged in popularity in recent years (Getty/iStock)

They came armed with totes, trash bags, empty strollers and collapsible nylon wagons. They came with wish lists and whispers of their “unicorns”, whose Latin names sounded like incantations: adansonii, patriciae, obliqua. Some travelled by aeroplane to get here. Others, in moving trucks. Because one does not walk into the 42nd Annual International Aroid Society Show and Sale simply to browse.

Aroids (it sort of rhymes with “steroids”) are a family of tropical plants that have surged in popularity in recent years and inspired a revival of the freewheeling Seventies jungle aesthetic. The monstera, whose perforated deliciosa leaves adorn smartphone cases and statement wallpaper, is an aroid. So are philodendrons, anthuriums and tetraspermas – plants prized not for fussy flowers, but for dramatic, lush foliage.

“With orchids, you have to be patient for it to flower,” says Anat Scham, 25, an animator who lives in Washington DC, and sold botanical illustrations at the show. “Whereas with foliage, it’s instant gratification.”

Several years ago, the Aroid Society, like some of its rarest specimens, appeared to be dwindling. The hobby had an arcane, almost Victorian dustiness to it, akin to collecting stamps or coins.

But in the past two or three years, says Alex Bello, 33, the president of the International Aroid Society and the chairman of the event, attendance has spiked from around 500 people in a weekend to a few thousand. “It has been exorbitant, the amount of people we’ve been getting,” he says. “We’ve been pummelled.”

When Bello opened the door of the Garden House at Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden on the first morning of the sale, on 21 September, attendees heaved into the room shoulder to shoulder. After the frenzy of buying and selling, I find Micah Garner, 32, posted up in line clutching two handfuls of plants and waiting for his girlfriend, Alessia Resta, 27, whose Instagram account, @apartmentbotanist, has nearly 40,000 followers. The couple live in New York and share their 700-square-foot apartment on the Upper West Side with around 200 plants. They brought an extra suitcase to carry home all the new ones.

Millennials have created Instagram accounts to show off their plants (Kelly Sikkema)

Resta found the plant at the top of her list, a $110 Philodendron luxurians “Choco.” “Right now it’s a little bit of an ugly stump, but one day, it’s going to be beautiful,” she says.

Another aroid type that has become a bona fide object of obsession for this new generation of collectors is the eminently photogenic variegated monstera, whose leaves are marbled with painterly splashes of white. At the show, one vendor from Ecuador sold individual cuttings for $200 apiece. A large, potted version sold for $650.

Right now it’s a little bit of an ugly stump, but one day, it’s going to be beautiful

But that’s nothing compared to the madness and mythos that swirls around the Monstera obliqua. “When you’re talking about how the Aroid Society’s changed, obliqua is probably the best example,” says Mick Mittermeier, 27, the aroid curator at Fairchild. Obliqua (in Latin, “lopsided”) is tiny, typically no taller than six or so inches, with lace-like foliage that almost appears to be more negative space than organic matter. A decade ago, a collector sold its cuttings at the show for $8 apiece, Mittermeier says. Now, a plant might go for a thousand bucks or more. “Last month,” he adds, “Enid sold one on eBay for $3,700.” It was $2,700, but still.

The plant lovers are getting younger and younger (PA) (PA Archive/PA Images)

One houseplant queen to rule them all

Enid Offolter, 49, isn’t a botanist. She doesn’t operate a wholesale nursery. She has a tough time explaining to the uninitiated what it is, exactly, that she does now. Before this, she sold vitamins. The simplest explanation is that Offolter sources, propagates and sells some of the most sought-after specimens of the tropical plant-collecting world. She’s become a bit of a plant celebrity in the process.

Born and raised in southern Florida, Offolter taught herself propagation through trial and error, and a few trustworthy books. Typically, she buys individual segments of plants (cuttings) from international importers, then carefully cultivates them until they’ve established root systems and leaves. This process can take one month or six, she says, depending on the species of plant, the condition in which it arrives (“sometimes I just get a box of goo”), and the season. A cutting acquired in May might be ready in a month, while the same plant started in October might not be viable until the following spring. “They’re a lot slower once the days slow down,” Offolter says.

Enid Offolter in her plant-lover’s paradise (Enid Offolter/Twitter)

She has run Natural Selections Exotics Tropicals, or NSE Tropicals, since 2000 from her home, on an otherwise typical residential street in a Fort Lauderdale suburb. Behind the tall wooden security fence in Offolter’s driveway hides an acre that is thrumming with life. There are so many plants that it’s almost impossible to focus on one at a time, like looking at a pointillist painting in a million shimmering hues of green.

Offolter loves propagation; it feels like magic to her. If it’s magic, it’s a practical kind: business is booming, and no one appears to be more surprised by this than she. “I feel like I was busy raising my son, then I looked up and all this was going on,” says Offolter. “I never realised this would go so far.”

When Offolter started NSE Tropicals, she mostly supplied to botanical gardens and speciality landscapers. Now, her customers are almost all young people. A lot of Offolter’s high-ticket specimens end up going to Portland, Seattle and New York. And they go fast, she says, often minutes after she posts about them on Instagram. She started the account last year and shot up to 40,000 followers in a few months.

“I certainly don’t advertise anymore,” she says. “All I have to do is say I have the plant, and people just go nuts.”

I certainly don’t advertise anymore. All I have to do is say I have the plant, and people just go nuts

Block quote caption

At the aroid show, strangers sheepishly approach her – “Hi, are you Enid?” – and ask for selfies. Some stifle a gasp when they see her. By lunchtime, she estimates she’s taken about 100 pictures.

Buyers pay top dollar for Offolter’s carefully cultivated plants (iStock) (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Aroids make up the vast majority of Offolter’s business, largely because she has a soft spot for weird. Their oddities abound: the protruding “unicorn horn” of a flower’s spadex, the snakeskin-like petioles of a particular anthurium, the vicious fish hooks along a cyrtosperma johnstonii. Then, there’s the melodrama of their foliage. “Flowers are a dime a dozen,” Offolter says, gazing at the curtain of philodendron tumbling from the wall of her shade house. “But I mean ... just look at these leaves.”

While Offolter lists most of her plants on NSE Tropicals’ website, she often turns the rarer stuff over to bidders on eBay (in part because she feels guilty for asking the sky-high prices they now frequently fetch). Recently, she auctioned off a variegated monstera adansonii and set the opening bid at $19. It sold for $2,700.

Few of Offolter’s plants have evoked quite the level of excitement that the variegated monstera has. It’s how I first learned about her – in a message board thread about how to find the increasingly scarce plants, where “Enid” and “NSE” were passed around like whispered passwords at a speakeasy.

Despite the incessant stream of orders, Offolter works alone and prefers it that way, spending seven days a week hunched over a packing bench in one of her four shade houses, carefully rolling up each plant in paper “like a burrito” before tucking it into a package. She could probably hire someone to help her with the mounting administrative duties. She could flex to meet what appears to be an insatiable demand for her plants. She could buy more land. “I have the option to go big or go home,” she acknowledges. But she’s sceptical: People can’t keep spending money like this, right? Then again, that’s what she said last year, and the year before.

Offolter finds that she has to work with, rather than against, nature (iStock) (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Working with nature in this way is a constant dance of give and take, and nature is always leading. Caterpillars and cold snaps can wreak havoc on valuable plants. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a rare specimen might bear fruit, like one of the variegated monsteras Offolter planted in her yard recently has. She can only hope that the squirrels don’t get to the corncob-size collection of seeds before they’re ready. “This thing could pay off the house,” she jokes.

Perhaps the most daunting and unpredictable challenge is climate – namely, surviving the ever-worsening hurricane seasons in south Florida. In 2017, after Hurricane Irma, Offolter says, “it looked like someone drove a bulldozer through here.” She lost two of her shade houses and the roof of her greenhouse to the storm, which reduced many of her plants to, in her words, “creamed spinach.” A storm could easily destroy her only source of income, but Offolter’s plants are more than just assets. “Imagine if your dogs got hurt in a hurricane,” she tells me. “Now imagine you have thousands of dogs.”

The pitfalls of plant parenthood

Countless articles have sought to unspool millennial motivations for loving plants: they’re a replacement for children, a respite from urban cityscapes, a totem of climate anxiety, a life preserver to which one can cling in uncertain times, a kind of self-care. Versions of all of these sentiments are echoed at the aroid show.

“It puts me in a really good head space,” says Chelsea Grace, 32, who owns a Seattle plant shop called Cultivate Propagate. “And,” she adda, “as dorky as it sounds, when things put out a new leaf, it feels really constructive.”

Hanging plants are a staple of millennial indoor gardens (iStock) (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

There’s also the unavoidable underbelly of any consumer bubble: hubris and hoarding, grifts and theft. There are shady sellers shilling questionable “seeds” online, rabid collectors swiping cuttings from botanical gardens and poachers ripping rare specimens out of their habitats without permits.

Instagram has spawned a lot of people who are influencing people’s buying decisions on plants, so those plants become more scarce, and all of a sudden everyone needs one

“Instagram has spawned a lot of people who are influencing people’s buying decisions on plants, so those plants become more scarce, and all of a sudden everyone needs one, then five, then 10, then a 100,” says Trevor Bradshaw, 31, who works at a garden center in Nashville, Tennessee. “It’s crazy that you can convince someone to buy a living thing, like it’s a luxury item.” Bradshaw says that he recently apprehended someone stealing variegated monstera cuttings from his store after they posted about the theft on Instagram.

Offolter, for one, doesn’t keep plants inside her home. It took time for her to get comfortable with the idea of sending a rare tropical specimen to go live in a decidedly not-tropical apartment. More recently, she’s seen how dedicated young collectors are making their homes hospitable to plant life, kitting out their living rooms with grow lights and foggers. “I’d hate to be some of these landlords,” she jokes.

It’s easier to feel connected to nature when you surround yourself with plants (iStock) (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

And she understands, as Grace pointed out, that it’s hard not to feel connected to nature when it’s unfurling right there in your living room. “You have your own little microcosm that you’re trying to control the climate in,” Grace says, “and you really see how that impacts your plants.”

Of the thousands in Offolter’s collection, there is one indisputable crown jewel, one she says she’ll never cut up and sell: spiritus sancti, a philodendron whose name, at least in these circles, is usually uttered with a kind of hushed reverence. In the wild, Philodendron spiritus sancti is nearing total extinction; Offolter says that the plants that still grow in native Brazil probably number in the single digits. The plant’s long, slender leaves are cloven at the top and tapered at the tip, like an exaggerated cartoon heart. What it lacks in Insta-optimized splashiness, it makes up for in understated beauty – not to mention its scarcity, which is why collectors will pay upward of $1,400 for one.

Offolter estimates that in the two decades she’s been in business, she’s sold maybe 20 or 30 spiritus sancti cuttings. One recent evening, she received four consecutive email enquiries from people hunting for it.

Plant mania is complicated, though. The spiritus sancti is a species on the brink of disappearing from nature entirely. While stockpiling it inside one’s Brooklyn apartment isn’t exactly the most generous interpretation of “conservation”, it is, at the very least, keeping it on the planet.

And, in the long run, a growing appreciation for plants might inspire more people to want to understand them, and not just as decorative objects. “It’s living things,” Offolter says. “It’s not puppies, but it’s still living things.”

© New York Times