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.