Indoor plant with four leaves sells for $8,000 in New Zealand Wish Steve Lucas (photopro) could comment on this news!
I saw that, ridiculous! That's $7062 CAD or $52836 USD. We're in the middle of huge boom in rare houseplant prices. Plants I was fretting over maybe spending $50 or $70 at the beginning of the year are now $200 or more. Online prices for plants above $50 are skyrocketing. Supply and demand I guess.
Apparently this plant is Rhaphidophora tetrasperma. @photopro had written about it at his website: Rhaphidophora tetrasperma, Rhaphidophora tetrasperma Hook.f, Exotic Rainforest rare tropical plants. He noted, Was it one of these that had been sold at the auction, I wonder.
Wow, I bet that winning bidder will wish they had read Steve's article first! Yes! Sorry, lol. That should have been $5286 USD.
That's assuming the transaction was real to begin with. It occurred to me that it could have been a setup to drum up interest and prices. The whole business sounds a bit shady given what we know.
Just saw this, how silly is everything becoming again !!! Shenzhen Nongke Orchid: $202,000 per Plant The orchid took eight years to develop and in 2005, it was sold at auction to an anonymous bidder for a shocking 1.68 million Yuan (around $202,000), making it the most expensive flower ever bought.17 May 2020
Tulip mania of 1637 as Michael F said and are we seeing another spike nearly 400 years later as plants are being used as a commodity only !!? There was an instance where 'one' Tulip bulb was used as a dowry for a bride in 1610. ( Encyclopedia Britannica). Don't think doweries are around now lol. But the point is well made at how silly things can become.
At the height of the craze - just before it collapsed - single tulip bulbs were sometimes selling for close to $1 million in today's prices
That's odd; I wonder why this discussion doesn't come up when I do searches on this plant. Even a targeted search on this, the forums' site using just "Rhaphidophora tetrasperma" does not pick it up. I was hoping others who are interested in this plant would be able to see this warning. Edit: I'm referring to internet search engines - not this forum's internal search function. The thread doesn't show up using Google but does with Bing. Search string used: "Rhaphidophora tetrasperma" site:forums.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca.
@Junglekeeper. this thread comes up when I copied Rhaphidophora from your posting just above into the forums search pane in a forums home window, and also when I copied/pasted Rhaphidophora tetrasperma. If you want to investigate this further, please start a new thread in the Forums Feedback forum and be clear about where the discussion doesn't come up and what you are filling in for your search. If you are doing the query from another forum and the "only search this forum" box is ticked, it won't come up. Please don't reply here - we can discuss it in a separate thread for that purpose. OK - you may reply just to say if I should start the thread there by moving these two posts and editing your post to refer to this thread.
I'm sorry I wasn't clear in my post. The observation was in relation to the search engines, namely Google, and not this forum's built-in search function. I've added a clarification to the said post.
