My Social Media

If you’re reading this from my blog, well, you’re in the heart of my social media already! I share the most content here, and I always publish new artwork on my blog first. However, I’ve been asked by some colleagues and students what my social media presence is like, particularly regarding my professional social media, so let’s get meta! (Also, note that I run my web browser in dark mode, so that’s why all the images below have dark backgrounds with white text. I find dark mode to be easier on my eyes.)

I retweet this blog, meaning that every blog post I make is also put onto my Twitter account. It’s 99% of my Twitter content; once in a blue moon I will tweet something other than a blog post, but it’s quite rare. I don’t reach many new viewers via Twitter since my own activity on the site is so low, but because it takes no effort to retweet these posts I figure I might as well.

I also publish most new artwork on Facebook and Reddit. On Facebook, though I make art posts public, the engagement is almost entirely from friends, colleagues, and former students. Reddit, however, engages complete strangers.

Often, I publish new artwork on Instagram too. I should be more consistent about posting on it, but for me Instagram begins to feel repetitive given my other sites/applications usage. Occasionally, I also share artwork on MetaFilter, which is text-based and a much smaller and more heavily moderated community than Reddit but is in some ways similar.

I have made artwork, reproduction, and commission sales via my blog, MetaFilter, Facebook, and Reddit. Sales are not my primary goal in engaging with viewers through social media - and I really should set up a shop at some point on this website so I can just direct buyers there - but they are another nice indication of audience appreciation!

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Scandals in the Houseplant Hobby

There have always been scandals in the world of houseplants. Big box stores selling dyed and painted plants, cacti and succulents with dried and dyed strawflowers glued on, injected orchid spikes (spoiler - there are no naturally blue Phalaenopsis), doomed plants in glass baubles, and glued-down top dressing are some common ones. Though more specialized nurseries tend not to commit those no-nos, many do sell tinted tillandsia and single Hoya kerrii leaves without stem cuttings that will never grow without any disclaimers. Some online sellers will purposefully mislabel or sell inert seeds or parts of a plant for propagation that will never be able to grow as well, relying on time, relative cost, and the ever-present risk inherent in attempting to grow seeds or propagate to erase any blame. And now there’s a new scandal rocking the houseplant world, the full scope is still in the process of being uncovered!

Let me first set the stage. If you, like me, have been in the houseplant hobby for decades, you might have noticed that it’s become quite the fad lately. There were (and still are!) some good online forums and blogs fifteen years ago, but recently I’ve witnessed the rise of “plantubers” aka YouTube stars who do surprisingly well discussing plants, Facebook groups, and - though I’m not that active on the platform - I’ve heard tell of Instagram plant influencers, aka plantfluencers. The rise of these various social media houseplant stars and societies has helped shape what is the must-have plant and drives demand for large swathes of new hobbyists. For whatever reason, right now monstera, philodendron, rarer pothos, and calathea are all hot commodities but the variegated and atypically colored ones are by far the most sought after. I actually don’t grow any of those types of plants aside from a small Philodendron ‘Prince of Orange’ at the moment; I had an early experience killing a calathea and have never felt called to try again, pothos to me seem common as dirt so while I don’t mind them I also don’t prioritize them, and while I like philodendrons including monstera a lot, they’re often large plants and I’d prefer to be able to have ten or twenty plants in the space where one philodendron might live. My Philodendron ‘Prince of Orange’ is a pretty plant though; its new growth comes in reddish orange and then over time it ages to a green. I think it cost either $3 or $4 because I bought it as a baby.

My Philodendron ‘Prince of Orange’ plunked behind several other plants on my outside shade table this summer.

I have joined or been added to quite a few of the Facebook plant groups over the years, and many are for buying and selling. I’ve always found most of the pricing on Facebook for plants to be overly high, so I think I’ve only purchased maybe three plants total from such listings. It turns out that even bearing that in mind, I was still apparently only in the more reasonably priced groups until a few weeks ago. At that time, I was invited to join two “plant purge” Facebook groups. The biggest is nuts, though I dislike the format and atmosphere of both. These groups structure their sales to be very small quantity buy-now-or-you-miss-it opportunities and build up excitement by dangling the most coveted plants ahead of time without prices and then “opening up” the sale hours to days later. This very intentionally is not meant to encourage calm research and reflection but rather hype, panic, and instant gratification; it’s basically gambling. People are buying individual plants for hundreds of dollars, regularly, in a flurry of adrenaline and a heady sense of exclusivity that rarely is accurate. Enter Philodendron ‘Pink Princess.’ It’s a variegated philodendron that has the same general shape, growth, size, and habit as my ‘Prince of Orange’ but it has green-base leaves with splashes of pink and sometimes cream variegation. It used to be sold for approximately the same price point as other philodendrons - typically somewhere between $6-20 per plant depending on size and store. Its explosion in popularity due to plant influencers means it now typically costs between $100-300 per plant, and that’s when you can find one at all. Pink is a very “in” coloration for the Instagram and Youtube plant crowd.

You now have the backstory. Recently a newcomer variegated philodendron arrived on the scene: Philodendron ‘Pink Congo’. (Newcomers do arrive sometimes - there are hybridizers and tissue culture cloners that introduce interesting new plants to the industry.) ‘Pink Congo’ was positioned and understood to be much like my ‘Prince of Orange’ in its growth habit but with pink leaves instead of orange. However, photos of ‘Pink Congo’ differed from ‘Prince of Orange.’ There were just dark green outer leaves and bright pink inner leaves. A few pictures appeared to show a different type of transition, where green patches started developing on some of the older pink leaves as opposed to the slow and total hue change on the entire leaf as per ‘Prince of Orange.'

From what I’ve read, people started paying $70-100 for ‘Pink Congo’ - mostly on these rabid Facebook groups but also occasionally on nursery websites, Instagram, eBay, and Etsy - and prices escalated from there. Then a knowledgeable hobbyist dropped a bomb on Facebook - the ‘Pink Congo’ was a fake and he had source material from an Indian vendor to prove it. He showed that the pink central leaf coloration was a temporary reaction to being gassed by ethylene and the plant would revert back to its standard green coloration in several months to a year or two and never grow more pink again. The base plant would typically sell in a $4-20 range.

Apparently some houseplant sellers knew it all along and were fine with it. Others didn’t, and decided to eat their own loss in having purchased the plants for resale so as not to lose credibility and trust. Many continue to sell them but added vaguely worded disclaimers that can be easily misinterpreted to give false hope. Meanwhile, a lot of buyers are upset that they dropped triple digits on temporary variegation, but some claim they don’t mind and plan to continue to buy ‘Pink Congo.’ A few have shared a belief that the scandal itself is the hoax, and that if anyone’s plant is reverting that it’s just an unstable variegation rather than a systemic fake.

And that’s the current scandal!

Wait… I did say it was still unfolding, so what’s that about? Apparently, philodendrons are not going to be the only ethylene-treated plants coming out of the import market! (Dun dun dun!) As far as I know, no one’s listed any other implicated plant varieties with specificity yet, but it’s a new ploy to be aware of across the hobby. I don’t know what other plants’ responses to being gassed with ethylene might look like, so any very unusual and new coloration might warrant a critical eye these days.

I Finally Joined Instagram!

I embraced social media early on (albeit with some healthy boundaries). I’ve had a personal website since high school that I built myself and hosted on my own domain. I also had a Xanga account in high school and early college, was an extremely early adopter of Facebook (my college was one of the first that Facebook expanded to), and obviously now keep a consistently updated blog which also feeds into my Twitter account. I am a member of several different online communities, and share my work in online galleries and publications as well as in print.

But I’ve resisted Instagram for one multifaceted reason - I’m a laptop person. I grew up right as computers and the internet came into force and had early and consistent access to them. However, mobile phones are a different story. While I had a friend or two in high school who had a cell phone, I never did. In fact, I didn’t have one through the first two years of college either. I finally got one in junior year, and then stuck with a basic cell phone through graduate school and into my early professional career even as smart phones became fairly common. I finally got a smart phone, too, and now am on my second one, but to this day I’ve never felt as comfortable with a phone as I do with a laptop.

Now you have to understand: Instagram doesn’t just discourage laptop usage in favor of mobile access; the company intentionally breaks the extensions that users write to sidestep the mobile requirement. I don’t know if it’s a target audience decision, or if there’s something in the coding, updating, and presentation that so strongly relies on mobile formatting that they want to force it, but there it is. I’ve downloaded a couple extensions in the past to try to trick the site into letting me use my laptop without success.

The problem is not only my general preference for laptops over phones. It’s also that I take all my professional photos with my digital camera, which is far better in quality than my smart phone’s camera. I also crop and color adjust my images in Photoshop, which is a computer-based software, so all of my imagery is pretty firmly linked to my laptop. It’s a hassle to have to repeatedly port over all of the photos I want to post to my phone. It’s not that I can’t do it, but with only so much time in the day, at some point you’ve got to prioritize some tasks over others. I figured I was doing enough on social media with the platforms I was using - my website and blog, Facebook, Twitter, online internet community participation, and various digital publications - so I decided to skip Instagram and hope that it was just a fad that would blow over.

But I reached a tipping point this week. My wonderful colleague Susan Nelson has recently joined Instagram and fallen in love, and I’m feeling left out of viewing her posts. My fantastic friend and chemistry collaborator Dr. John Pojman has asked me to join repeatedly and the guilt in not acceding to his wishes has gotten to me. Many other great friends, particularly internationally, have asked me to join as well. And finally, I have to grudgingly admit that Instagram is not a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon. It is sticking around. As an artist who wants to engage with as broad an audience as possible, and who also likes to stay technologically current, I can’t resist any longer. Instagram, here I come!

If you’re already on Instagram (and let’s face it, I’m a very late adopter here, so I expect you probably are) you can find me @shelbyprindaville. The profile is rather barren right now because I want to parcel out my artwork in new posts every couple of days until the backlog is cleared instead of vomiting it all up at once, but I intend to develop it and keep it up to date just as I do with the rest of my social media.

Here’s to progress!