School of humans.
Deep in the mountainous rainforests of southeastern Brazil, not far from the village of Domingos Marchings, grows a plant. Its stalks are long and narrow, a crown of dangling green. It grows out of the mist below the canopy, slowly creeping up the trunks of trees. As it matures. It hangs above the ground like a chandelier. The blades of each leaf splayed like the wings of an angel. The plant's name is philodendron. Spirit is sancty Latin for holy ghost.
It is one of the rarest plants in the world. Only a few specimens grow in the wild. To plant collectors, the words spirit is sancty illicit goosebumps. The plant's name is spoken with hushed religious reverence. Many call it the holy Grail of philodendrons.
It's only found in the wild in one small town in Brazil at this point, as far.
As we know, that's doctor Arinovi. He's the president and CEO of the San Diego Botanic Garden.
A big part about why it has such value to collectors is it has very beautiful long leaves. It looks fantastic and it's incredibly hard to propagate.
A botched cutting, for example, could kill the entire plant, and that's why captive Spirit of Sancty specimens are best handled by professionals, people like doctor Novi and the folks at the garden in San Diego.
We have about five thousand a little over five thousand individual plant taxa or species that are represented within our collections. It is an ungodly diversity of plants.
This collection includes rare and endangered species like the Hawaiian Hibiscus aka Hibiscus rosa sinensis, the Bastard quivertree or Alliodendron pilancie, and of course the Holy Relic of southern Brazil. For years, the Spirit of Sancty was one of San Diego's centerpieces. It hangs high above the ground, delicately suspended from the greenhouse's ceiling, far out of reach of passers by. At
least that's what they thought. One morning in May twenty twenty, a garden employee stepped into the greenhouse, peered up and witnessed a blasphemy.
Our director of porta Culture at the time was in the garden and he felt like that basket looked a little less who eventually got out a ladder and climbed up and saw that this plant had been kind of hacked off.
It became clear what had happened, and the dead of night somebody had broken into the garden, grabbed a pole saw or a long pair of lappers, and hacked off pieces of the treasured plant. The heist seemed meticulously planned.
There were no signs of breaking or entering.
There are other valuable plants in that space that they were not targeted, but it certainly seems like somebody was aware of our habits, you know, somebody was, for lack of a better term, kind of tasting the joint.
For a while.
The reason they targeted the spiritus money.
That was probably the single highest value plant in the collection of the Botanic Garden in terms of what you could get for resale value. This plant could sell for between ten and fifteen thousand dollars on the open market.
Fifteen thousand dollars. A Spirit of Sancty is more than a plant. It's a status symbol, an investment, a limited edition Rolex that knows photosynthesis, and that price tag has done much more than simply drained the pockets of rich plant lovers it's fueled a spree of crime and lies and deceit. I'm Summer rain Oaks. On this episode, a look inside a booming craze for house plans and how a cultural obsession and the human instinct to keep up with the joneses might be killing the things we love
the most. From School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. This is Bad Seeds. It's twenty twelve and a small crowd is gathered for the International Alloyd Society Fall Show and Sale in Florida. It's an annual banquet and this year doctor Tom Crowet of the Missouri Botanical Garden and Tom Moore, founder of the Tropical Fern and Exotic Plant Society, are holding a plant they call the Piece de Resistance.
Mortgage your house, Tell your children on this plant. It's been a little stock market.
It's a spiritus sancty, a small one, but a spirit is nonetheless. And then the bidding begins.
World works your money tonight.
You have fifty dollars opening bed. Come.
I got two hundred, three hundred three, I got four hundred, I got four hundred back.
I got four hundred back.
You're gonna let this go for four hundred.
Dollars, of course not. The bids keep rising. Five hundred seven hundred, nine hundred nine.
Fifty I got nine fifty nine seventy seven to got money.
I got what.
I'm gonna go.
One thousand, once, one thousand, twice.
So.
One thousand dollars for a potted plant with just six leaves. This again, was twenty twelve, just over a decade later. That price seems quaint now. I remember when I first learned about the Spirit of Sancty. It was five years ago and I was doing a tour with a popular arroid grower, end A Falter. During that tour, I got to see the plant for the first time.
This is the awesome Spirit of Sancty, one of the most rare philodendrons in the world. It's not in a lot of collections, and it's hard to get a hold of one.
Actually, she tried to convey just how rare this plant was, but to be honest, I didn't really grasp it at the time.
Well, they're first, they're expensive, and they're hard to get. There's only a few people that even wouldever have one to sell.
You've got few would ever loan you at cutting either. That scarcity however, drives an aggressive market for the rare plants. It keeps prices high. In fact, if you bought and held onto that plant auctioned off in Florida, its value would have yielded an annual rate of return of about twenty eight percent, beating out gold. Prices have been turbocharged in the past few years, so much so that it's taken experts like doctor Arinovi by surprise.
We knew that that plant prices were going up, and that during the pandemic, you know, people were getting more enthusiastic about house plants and even some rare plants, which mostly we looked at as a wonderful thing. But you know, we started looking at eBay and other things and being like, oh my god. We didn't realize that the same plant that you used to be able to buy for fifteen dollars at home depot now goes for.
Three four hundred dollars.
Driving this boom is classic supply and demand. There aren't many plants, but there are a ton of people who want them, so prices go up. In fact, one online plant store in Britain saw sales surge five hundred percent during lockdown. But who are these people driving up prices. If you read the headlines, it seems pretty obvious.
California hipster plants at the center of smuggling crisis.
What is it with millennials and cactuses?
If only hipsters had stuck to their handlebar, mustaches and craft beer, this never would have happened.
Yep, the same people who got blamed for killing the napkin industry, mayonnaise, the nine to five workday, and lately, well pretty much everything else. Millennials.
We saw a whole generation of young people who previously weren't that engaged in house plans get excited about it, and again, that is ninety nine percent awesome. The only thing about it that's not awesome is that it did lead to a market that encouraged theft den poachings.
The pandemic, of course, deserves a lot of blame too. Millions of us, trapped inside and craving something to do, began transforming our homes into sanctuaries, and it wasn't long before viral posts on TikTok began touting the plant mom and plant dad lifestyle. But the question I keep coming back to is is that the real reason this plant craze is happening? Or is there something about human nature, something dark, that just makes us crazy for plants. Here's
the thing about our recent plant obsession. It's nothing new. Just ask Charles Mackay. In the eighteen forties, Mackay, a Scottish journalist, became fascinated with herd behavior, how certain interests or beliefs grew to overtake entire cultures. So in eighteen forty one, Mackay published the first volume of his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, witch Hunts, Alchemy,
the Crusades. The book plum the Darkest Recesses of the Human Mind, and in it Mackay concluded that these trends and obsessions are just part of a cultural cycle.
Millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion and drawn after it till their tension is caughked by some new folly more captivating.
Than the first.
One. Such folly, he wrote, was an irrational mania for plants, specifically tulips. It's the sixteen thirties, Holland. New trade routes just opened to the Ottoman Empire, leading the Dutch to quote unquote discover new foods, new spices, new ideas, and of course new plants. It's an exciting time and people are positively enchanted with everything coming out of the Far East, including a vibrant flower native to the lush valleys of my China and Afghanistan, the tulip. Within years, everybody in
Holland wanted to get their hands on some tulips. According to Mackay, speculators began buying up bulbs, not with the intent of planting them, but in the hopes of just reselling them for a profit. And this rich scheme it worked. The cost of tulip skyrocketed, with some bulbs fetching more than a single year's wage. One bulb was valued to cost as much as twelve acres of corn. But then
the craze stopped. People came to their senses the bubble burst, Speculators panicked and prices, according to some estimates, collapsed as much as ninety nine percent, and some people lost everything. Now it's important to note that Mackay had a habit of bending the truth a bit. His reports that this tulip mania plunged Holland into economic ruin are exaggerated, but the obsession was very real, as was another plant madness growing right outside Mackay's front door. This time it was ferns.
In nineteenth century Britain, ferns were inescapable botanic gardens overflowed with fern specimens. Readers gobbled up literature on the subject and turned niche fern collecting books into best sellers. People subscribed to fern magazines and joined fern societies, with fern loving propagandists arguing that owning ferns was proof of intelligence that improved virility and mental health. But beyond all that, they were just another way to show off well to do.
Collectors hired explorers to trot around Panama, Honduras and Tasmania to find rare ferns. Meanwhile, the middle class trekked towards coastal hillsides and dug up the plants themselves. It was like a treasure hunt, and it wasn't always fun in games. According to the September eighteen sixty seven Floral World and Garden Guide, one British woman, Miss Jane Myers, plunged off a cliff one hundred and seventy feet to her death
while trying to pick a fern like tulips. The price of foreign ferns exploded, with some selling for more than one thousand dollars in today's money. Crook's cut wind pretty fast. Knowing they could earn an easy shilling, they started poaching ferns. It got so bad that botanists started to worry about the plant's survival. In his book The Flora of Cornwall, the botanist H. Davy wrote, it's.
A shameful plundering has gone on that I now hesitate to speak or write about localities where the royal fern grows.
As the naturalist Peter da Boyd tells us, it wasn't epidemic, with careless poachers catering to the demand of fern enthusiasts.
The search for wild species led to the plundering of woodlands and hillsides, stream sides and whole woodlands would be effectively destroyed as regards their ferns by collecting literally tons of fern plants where unscrupulous collectors didn't think about what effect it might have on the environment. For most of the nineteenth century, there was no law against collecting ferns, but.
That changed in February eighteen ninety six, a periodical called The Gardener's Chronicle documented the punishment for a pair of fern thieves.
Fern stealers William Moby and Charles Williams of Bexley, Kent, were engaged with the horse and cart and the wholesale removal of ferns. Moby was sentenced to six weeks hard labor and Williams to one month.
The wholesale plunder of ferns would turn the whole British countryside into one big crime scene, and that sparked the conservation movement.
Such damage led to the first legal plant protection in Britain.
Some of those laws, however, would arrive too late. The Killarney fern or Trichomani's speciosum, admired for its lacy, almost translucent leaves, nearly went extinct in Scotland. And that brings us back to the present day and our pandemic induced plant mania. It reminds me of something that doctor Arinovi told us.
But you buy it illegal plants, you may be financing the destruction of an irreplaceable ecosystem that cannot come back. So the stakes are kind of high, and like I said, we unfortunately now have evidence that this big plant craze during the pandemic may have wiped out several species around the world just just from poaching.
So it's it's not trivial.
But who is really to blame? Is that boom and prices and the surgeon poaching really driven by millennials. To find the answer, we had to go to the coastal cliffs of northern California. High above crashing waves and not far from the meandering curves of Highway One, rose Dudleya Farinosa, a small cliff dwelling succulent nicknamed bluff lettuce. Around twenty eighteen, succulent poachers started plaguing these coasts, plucking thousands of Dudleya from the cliff side. Many of the people who were
caught were Korean. One stole six hundred thousand dollars worth of succulents. Headline writers pounced. Soon news agencies were claiming that these thieves were motivated by quote, housewives and hipsters, people who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a single succulent. You might remember our friend doctor Jared margolis So.
The obvious sort of narratives emerged that every housewife and hipster in South Korea wanted one of these Dudleia, and that there was this succulent mania happening in East Asia that was driving this trade, and that people just saw an opportunity to steal the plants and make a huge profit off of it.
In other words, the madness of crowds was just working its magic again. But something about that narrative didn't sit right with doctor Margulis, Like, why would somebody steal Dudleya.
These plants were legally available for purchase from a variety of outlets in California, and they sort of looked like a commonplace succulent, you know, they have a nice, pretty rosette shape, and they put out a lovely sort of inflorescence in flower. They're not a rare species, and so people were pretty confused why suddenly it looked like people were stealing them by the thousands from their habitat.
Not to mention that bluff lettuce, it's not a beginner's plant.
Dudley As are really hard to grow as houseplants, and they really require an enormous amount of specialized care to keep them alive outside of their native habitat. On the West coast of California. So these were not plants that were being bought and sold by our typical succulent consumer.
This didn't sound like the madness of crowds at work. This sounded like something else. Doctor Margulis needed to know more.
I decided I had to go spend some time in South Korea to try to really understand and do my best to analyze these narratives and what was really happening in the trade there.
So Margoulis flew to Korea. He visited nurseries and garden centers and talked to shop owners about dudley A sales. He discovered they were not a widely popular succulent plant amongst mainstream consumers in Seoul. Margulis popped into three of the city's largest succulent markets. Only one was selling the California Succulent. The vendor complained about a lack of demand. This didn't fit the narrative played out back home.
These plants are really were only being sought by highly specialized collectors with a typically with a lot of skill and capacity to care for them, owning and maintaining either professional greenhouses or renting space in someone else's greenhouse in order to keep them alive. This was not sort of being driven by mainstream consumer culture.
One plant dealer told Markulla's point blank, this isn't about Chinese collectors, or Japanese collectors or Korean collectors. This is about individual collectors and what they want. Millennial plant moms and plant dads weren't driving the crime spree in California. It was a small group of collectors, hardcore hobbyists, demanding that the plant be ripped from the ground, and as it turns out, they'd do just about anything to have it.
You can hear the pain in doctor Novi's voice when he thinks back to the spirit of sancty heist.
It would almost have been better if, like somebody was trying to steal our computers and like ruin the plants incidentally, because you know, you should have understand petty theft. But this is like premeditated, Let's find the rarest plant around here and steal it, taking it away from public usage.
After the initial shock of the robbery, the botanic Garden notified police, who at first didn't really understand the magnitude of the crime.
Probably the first second we were talking to law enforcement they probably were like, you know, this is some person in a neighborhood, and like, you know, some neighbors stole their prizes. But like, you know, as soon as we said here's who we are, this plant could sell for between ten and fifteen thousand dollars on the open market.
Like they're like, oh, and I think they treated it like any object you know of that level value, if you know, if somebody called up and said, you know, someone stole my car.
But the Botanic Garden was already at a disadvantage when it comes to high level plant crimes. Most local law enforcement officers are extremely inexperienced.
Back in the nineteen nineties, when the Garden did have the theft of psychic heads, the garden benefited from the fact that the Sheriff's office in San Diego had an Agricultural Crimes division.
That's right, an entire unit dedicated to plant crimes, which is not super common, especially these days.
So there are no longer, to our knowledge, detectives within the San Diego law enforcement community that are specifically trained on and or daily dealing with agricultural, plant and animal theft.
Law enforcement doesn't get to practice it as much.
It means a certain kind of expertise is not present when it does happen.
So to say the least, the police did not turn up many promising leads. At one point, they suggested the possibility of an inside job. The idea had merit. One prominent plant influencer online bragged that whenever he volunteered at botanic gardens, he'd steal rare clippings. The practice called proplifting, a portmanteau of propagate and shoplifting, is increasingly common. A Reddit page dedicated to legal and I Stress legal proplifting
has more than two hundred thousand members. But in San Diego, the theft of the Spirit of Sancty went beyond simple proplifting. This was the work of an obsessive who knew what they were doing, and it would only be solved with the help of other obsessives. And that is when the gardens started getting tips from other plant lovers. People began trawling forums and social media looking for somebody, anybody trying to sell the famed plant.
We started to get from the online aroid community saying, hey, we're seeing some chatter, you know, in some of the you know, blogs and social media. So that there might be a plant for sale that sounds like it might potentially be yours. The timing is right, the size and this and that.
Pictures of the plant in question began turning up in the San Diego botanist inbox. One of them caught Novi's eye.
Plant people are like dog people, and you know, we look at the plants in the same way that dog people or other pet owners, you know, or pet parents, you know, look at their pets. And so, you know, we know how many leaves that were on that one, We know the color differences between young leaves and old leaves, and so we told law enforcement and others that the plant in question looked a heck of a lot like our plant.
So the police did their investigation.
Law enforcement actually went to see one of the individuals who some people in the community thought either may have stolen it or somehow acquired it, you know, maybe they thought it was legal and was reselling it. Law enforcement told us that the person had an all buy or just there wasn't enough evidence.
They couldn't move any further.
So the investigation stalled, and Novena's colleagues resigned themselves to the fact that the plant was probably lost forever.
I would put money on the fact that this plant died. I mean, this thing was so hacked up, like you know, they're very hard to root. I think somebody sold this plant for fifteen thousand dollars and the person who bought it didn't really know what they're doing, and.
I think it died.
You know.
That's like for us, you know, and when you've cared for that plant for ten or more years and it's it's pretty devastating, you know. But I think, like everything else, you know, you try to build resilience from tragedy.
But that's tough. Because the theft at the San Diego Botanic Garden, it's not uncommon. The list of thefts from institutions to community gardens stretches from Jerusalem to Sydney to Penang Church, New Zealand. A single plant where three thousand New Zealand dollars was pilford in Coral Gables, Florida, robbers ran off with two thousand dollars worth of greenery in Brooklyn five thousand dollars and because of these thieves, the public has lost priceless bonzize, rare orchids, and the world's
smallest water lily. The basic fact is, if you know a botanic garden, somebody has probably stolen from.
This is not someone's stealing a loaf of bread because they're hungry, right, I mean, this is somebody very clearly taking something that's not theirs, that's being maintained by a public, nonprofit institution to benefit the public and posterity, and deciding to try to create personal value and wealth gain out of that theft.
So, I mean, I.
Don't think we have to dance around whether or not it's evil. Is it, you know, evil on a high level. That's a different.
Question, and it's a question we're going to grapple with for the rest of this show because rhymes like this go far beyond questions of whether it's right or wrong to steal. It shows how a passionate hobby or obsession could put the planet end people's lives at risk. Next episode, we dive deeper into the shadows following a team of poachers and join the detectives who are hot on their tail.
Ended up going to this really kind of sketchy pot of just flown cattail knocker territory in Mexico. I'm just gone met us on the side of the highway on his Marta black and he was departure.
I'm Summer rain Oaks. Join us again next time for Bad Seeds. Bad Seeds is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. I'm your Host Summer rain Oaks. Lucas Riley is our writer, Gabby Watts is our producer, and Amelia Brock is our senior producer. Fact Checking is by Savannah Hugely and Zoe Farrow. Music is by Claire Campbell. Sound design and score is by Jesse Niswanger. Development was
by Brian Lavin and Jacob Selzer. Special thanks to our voice actors Etily's Perez, Frank Swain, Reuben wu and Paul Feiffe. Executive producers are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and Jacob Selzer.
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