The houseplant was sold through TradeMe, a sales site similar to Marktplaats. The seller speaks of a ‘very rare’ variant of the ‘hip’ houseplant philodendron minima.
Minimum price? A dollar
The plant has only four leaves, all with two different colors. It is a ‘healthy plant’ in a 14 centimeter pot. The minimum price the seller asked for it? 1 dollar. But the sale amount went through an auction soon amount to into the thousands of dollars.
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Ultimately, the top prize of $ 8150 was paid by a buyer north of the New Zealand city of Auckland. Who that is and why he or she wanted to pay so much money for the plant? It’s not clear.
Rare
New Zealand plant expert Mike Hawthorne has seen many plant auctions come by, but he has never seen a houseplant sold for such a high price.
“This copy is very rare in New Zealand”, Hawthorne explains to RTL News. “I suspect that the buyers will use these philodendron minima to grow, for example by means of cuttings and tissues. That way they can sell many more specimens later.”
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Very strict rules
New Zealand has very strict import regulations. “In the past, plant and animal species were brought here and then became a pest,” explains Hawthorne. “For example, wild pines have appeared in New Zealand, while that type of tree does not originally occur here. The original native forests have been completely swallowed up by pine forests in some places.”
Rules have been drawn up to prevent such a thing from happening again in the future. “It may well be that this plant was imported. If so, it would have cost the owners a lot of money. The New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC) has had to keep an eye on the plant for a long time to ensure that it does not develop. cannot develop into a pest. “
Huge hype
In addition, indoor plants have become a huge hype in recent corona time, Hawthorne sees. “Walk into any garden center and you will have a hard time finding a suitable houseplant. Growers simply cannot meet the demand.”
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The demand for indoor plants has recently been enormous via TradeMe, a spokesman reports The Guardian. “In the past seven days, for example, the plant species hoya has been searched for no less than 65,000 times,” Ruby Topzand explains to the British newspaper. Minimums, the type sold for the astronomical amount, were searched 1,600 times in the past few days.
Previous record
Earlier this year, a houseplant was sold through TradeMe in New Zealand for $ 6,500 ($ 3,700). It was known to be the most expensive houseplant ever sold in the country.
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