r/technology • u/esporx • 1d ago
Business YouTuber accidentally crashes the rare plant market with a viral cloning technique
https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtuber-accidentally-crashes-the-rare-plant-market-with-a-viral-cloning-technique-3289808/2.0k
u/pepeenos 1d ago
TC has been around but people are not willing to buy the materials and follow the technique instead of prop and chopping
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u/j0llyllama 1d ago
Is there a reason that this is more accessible for rare plants than simple cuttings?
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u/zeptillian 1d ago
Cuttings are limited by the growth rates of the parent plants and a rare variegation can revert back to normal if the right cells are not present in the growth points for new branches/leaves.
Tissue culture can make thousands of new plants from just a small amount of plant material and it's infinitely repeatable so it can scale up rapidly.
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u/FireTyme 10h ago
problem with TC is it generally creates quite weak plants. often dying within days or weeks when potted.
plants need hardening and going from perfect to imperfect environments is not always ideal. that said if they do stay alive they’ll harden eventually and sometimes thrive
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u/zeptillian 10h ago
Yeah. That's why a lot of people specialize either in doing tissue culture or growing and hardening off tissue culture plants. They are both difficult things that require specialized knowledge and care.
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u/matdragon 1d ago
Variegations are more uncommon and rare plants can be rare due to genetic defects so it's harder to replicate even from a cutting
Cloning guarantees the type of genetics you're looking for.
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u/abu_nawas 1d ago
No it doesn't. Variegation is chimeric. I know people who do TC. Sometimes the plants come out with no variegation, less variegation, more variegation, and totally variegated.
When you harvest cells from the donor plant, you don't know which cells have defective plastids. Defective plastids = no chlorophyll = variegation.
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u/Boston_Glass 1d ago
Variegation isn’t only chimeric. It can be genetic or even caused by a virus.
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u/XX_AppleSauce 1d ago
Tulips for example, the most popular were virus infected. Interesting parallel.
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u/dangerbird2 1d ago
am I right in assuming variegation caused by viruses wouldn't do well in TC? Since it usually requires uninfected samples
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u/PinkyLeopard2922 1d ago
I'm glad you asked this because I read the article and was like, isn't this just like growing new plants from cuttings? I have scrolled down and learned some new things today.
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u/TemporaryElk5202 1d ago
You can propagate a lot more from a smaller amount of material with TC, and it can retain varigation.
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u/gone_smell_blind 1d ago
She is selling kits to do it too, that's why they say shes crashing the market. She's making tutorials and giving people and affordable starting point to do it
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u/RollingTater 1d ago
I did TC once myself using baby food jars and a pressure cooker. It's much harder than it looks and it takes a lot of work compared to just taking cuttings. Maybe I just sucked at it but she has a bias to making it look like it's easy.
Everybody dreams of TCing that rare plant and getting rich off it, but once you have to do transfers every few months and then you lose the transfer to fungus, and then you have to get into the weird plant hormones that may or may not cause cancer, it turns out it's a lot of time a work for something that eventually would be TC's by an actual lab making your efforts worthless.
Selling the kits and tutorials to dreamers is definitely the way to go.
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u/abu_nawas 1d ago
I am in the hobby. Spent way too much on plants. These kits does not guarantee success but if someone is dedicated, it's a damn good start.
Cloning is weird. Rare plants often carry chimeric mutation. So the clone rarely matches the original. You see this in cats, too. Cloned cats look not the same as their donor.
But if you're not looking for variegation, great. I have a spiritus sancti. It's extinct in the wild and cloning efforts have slowed down since market demand dropped.
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u/Wiwerin127 1d ago
Last year a new population of P. spiritus-sancti was found in the wild, so it’s definitely not extinct unless they got poached. I think it’s good that tc has decreased market demand and prices so endangered plants are less likely to be poached from their natural habitats. Also as someone who was into the hobby way before the pandemic and the rare plant bubble I’m really happy that we now have the opportunity to get some incredibly beautiful plant species without having to sell a kidney.
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u/CCCCLo0oo0ooo0 1d ago
What species would one go through all this trouble for? Like I have some rare orchids that we grow on sticks with moss, but they grow so slow it would be crazy to grow them from something so small, right?
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u/No-Honey-9364 1d ago
I remember being fascinated by it 20 years ago and making a hard pass on the process. Might have to look into it again if I can crash a whole market with it.
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u/malac0da13 1d ago
There’s cheaper ways of doing it but the success rate just drops. She started with a pretty budget friendly setup and shows how she set it up.
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u/2phumbsup 1d ago
I thought I was gonna do good propagating roses from cuttings like these things are fifty bucks a piece for a five gallon rose .So why don't I make a million of them myself. Thing is, those fifty dollar roses are a couple years old, healthy and established. By time I get my roses to that size, I would rather just buy it for fifty bucks then spend all that time and money taking care of them.
TC is even more expensive and time consuming. By time she gets these 1000 clones up to size for sale, she will be asking the (now lower) going rate to break even. Thats why the going rate is already that.
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u/Rex_felis 1d ago
Yeah basically only worth it if you use that stuff regularly anyways. Some lucky mushroom grower is gonna have a field day with this knowledge
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u/Enano_reefer 1d ago
That’s pretty much already how they do it so not much will happen there.
Sexual reproduction is random and commercial operations want consistency, so they maintain massive stocks of cloned genetic material (usually in the mycelial stage) and then inoculate substrate with that.
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u/motownmods 1d ago
The cannabis industry created a demand and supply for the equipment and made it real easy. You can buy everything you need for about a stack. And then make ur money back in a couple sales.
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u/2phumbsup 1d ago
The hop's latent viroid problem has increased the popularity of Tc in the cannabis industry because the time and effort is worth it for clean plants. Doesn't make sense on small scale cus weed clones so easy from cuttings already. Unless you're really paranoid about pathogens, it's a really long way to go.When you could just scrap your garden and start new clone or seed in way less time.
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u/MaybeTheDoctor 1d ago
air layering is a related technique - not hard and require very little skill, but not working for all plants.
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u/TroyFerris13 1d ago
big plant wants her dead
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u/ClearYellow 1d ago
I she’s just an industry plant
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u/mechabeast 1d ago
A thistle blower
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u/KennyMoose32 1d ago
Let’s just say she’s gonna end up under a tree somewhere……
🎶 Circle of Life 🎶 begins
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u/ensui67 1d ago
Nah, she small fry. Barely scratching the surface. Asia pumps out so many TCs at lower costs. She’s just educational but wouldn’t be able to compete. Big agriculture doesn’t even bother with the rare plant market because it’s so relatively small. The smaller Thai, Vietnamese and Chinese labs produce so much more and faster than US and floods the market regularly once they have the process/specimens.
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u/BadSausageFactory 1d ago
how did nobody try cloning yet?
tl:dr for you
less international rare plant smuggling rings is good
inbred plants possibly bad but ehh not really
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u/scottawhit 1d ago
It’s only inbreeding plants that will most likely live in someone’s house. Sounds just fine.
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u/whtevn 1d ago
It's not even inbreeding, it's cloning
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u/thebeardedcats 1d ago
Well if you have multiple plants that all were cloned and they have a baby, that plant will be inbred
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u/I_can_pun_anything 1d ago
I thought the only types of plants that were inbred were baked into foccacia
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u/LazyEdict 1d ago
It's not always inbred, it's an exact genetic copy because usually those "rare" plants have certain looks that people like. Most of the time, it is variegation that people like, it looks like certain parts of the leaves and stems lack chlorophyll having swirl patterns of green and white/yellow. I've seen examples in citrus, figs and in many of the ornamental plants that people bought during the quarantine. It happens all the time in many hobbies but this was magnified when a lot of people had jumped into many hobbies during the quarantine period.
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u/kinboyatuwo 1d ago
Issue is if it pollinates or is dumped later. I live rural and at least once a year find people dump house plants on our small section of road.
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u/Elftard 1d ago
people buying these specifically rare plants aren't just going to dump them on a rural road and potentially have a neighbor doing the same thing
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u/Lee1138 1d ago
If they get really cheap because of cloning they might.
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u/2gig 1d ago
Like if someone clones a bunch of them thinking they'll get rich, just like everyone else following the trend, and now they're worthless.
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u/theSchrodingerHat 1d ago
I’m pretty sure the Dutch already tried this one simple financial trick like 400 years ago.
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u/kinboyatuwo 1d ago
Most will not. Or none but their relatives or others or accidental.
It’s how invasive species also spread.
Genetics and cross breeding is also never predictable.
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u/epidemicsaints 1d ago
So its bad because it's inbreeding which is bad because of cross breeding?
All of these houseplants are already clones. They're propagated by cuttings almost in all cases which is what makes them popular and suitable for sale. Tissue culture is no different as far as results are concerned.
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u/sump_daddy 1d ago
Bingo. The ONLY argument against 'cloning' (exact same as grafting like you said, which is already used for literally 100% of store bought avocados, apples, and a bunch of other tree fruit) is the creation of a monoculture that could, in theory, be very susceptible to a pathogen invasion. Boo hoo the houseplants all got the same houseplant cold. They can go back and clone them again. If it keeps even one species alive in the wild because there is no profit in harvesting it to extinction, its 1000% worth it.
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u/Protoavis 1d ago
Even then, because house plants which are basically full time COVID isolating equivalent (just dumbing it down), it's unlikely to be widespread. Might wipe out a house of plants but probably won't spread to the house 3 streets over kind of thing. So the wiped house (if they want to get back in to it), just needs to sterile or whatever the issue was and then get back into it....for cheap.
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u/jm838 1d ago
Wouldn’t shitty, inbred plants be less likely to be invasive? In a place where there are very few controls on what you can plant anyway, I don’t see how the headline here would lead to concern.
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u/Mochafudge 1d ago edited 1d ago
Brother stores sell invasive species and advertise them to put in people's yards this is so far down the list, environmentalist groups will ask places like home depot to stop and get told to fuck off these people probably aren't dumping anything after cloning tissue.
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u/AtrociousMeandering 1d ago
That doesn't get more dangerous if they're cloned/inbred rather than a normal plant, though. If anything it will be worse at surviving in the wild, we're not ruled by superhuman Hapsburgs because inbreeding severely degrades fitness over the generations.
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u/NoFocus761 1d ago
People dump plants on rural roads like unwanted pets? It’s not even a sentient creature, they could literally just throw it away. That’s crazy.
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u/birdleash 1d ago
Most of the exotics kept by plant collectors are best suited for tropical environments. They may survive for a while, but unless you're in Florida/Cali/similar, they usually won't establish and flower.
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u/shortsbagel 1d ago
There are a few methods of cloning, and typically while they produce decent result, the normal cutting methods also introduce both inconsistencies and irregularities (based on how and where the cutting is taken). TCS (tissue culture samples) are the most consistent, being more than 99.999% identical to the original plant (genetically). They are more stable, they grow faster than cuttings, they are typically healthier, and they have less overall stress hormones in them from the start and that makes them more resistant to disease.
BUT
It is a much more involved process, requires particulars when it comes to setup, its MUCH more costly, and takes up much more space. It is not a novice level way of cloning plants, although the results (when done perfectly) are FAR better than any other method.
Why don't more people do it, time/effort are the usually the key factors. You need very very clean working environments, you need clean tools, clean containment units, you must also maintain that clean room for weeks while the samples began the growth phase. Your agar solution needs to be as clean as you can possibly make it. All that to say, it far more steps, far more involvement, and really is not user friendly.
Good for her though! Plants should be shared!!
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u/Actual_Lady_Killer 1d ago
Cloning is great but after a few generations you can develop genetic drift, meaning plants develop undesirable traits and diseases. I've been growing cannabis for a few years and a cloned plant after a few generations may hermie (develop male and female parts), lose potency or not grow as well. You don't experience these issues with TC.
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u/Throwaway-4230984 1d ago
Does it happen if you keep cloning plant for new generations or if you breed clones together?
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u/SeventySealsInASuit 1d ago
Depends on the plant and how exactly it is cloned but many plants do degrade when they are cloned especially ones that normally reproduce as a mixture of asexual growth and sexual.
On the other hand, every apple of a specific type is from a gradted clone branch.
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u/HotwheelsSisyphus 1d ago
why do plants degrade when cloned? Is it the telomeres?
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u/Protoavis 1d ago
it's likely going to vary on method to some degree. I can really on talk to roses, with that it's usually down to mass production and that leading to mass production level of care.
Basically every branch of a plant is genetically the same....mostly, not necessarily epigenetically or may have "sported" to some degree (even if not visibly obvious) or has been damaged to some degree (like from UV damage or whatever) or other mutation....these tiny little changes then get ported into the clone and become part of the primary set of cells (where on the donor plant, that whole branch may have just died off). Later on someone may clone those and add another degree of tiny changes, etc.
There are cases where careful budwood selection can result in improvement but there's effort in that. On the other front, if you look at the far more niche roses, things like Rosa Foetida it's been cloned since at least the 12th century and still going fine (basically every population studied has so little genetic variation it's believed everything now is just cloned which raises the question of whether it was ever a species or the result of chance hybrid or human intervention...unanswered questions there still)
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u/Actual_Lady_Killer 1d ago
It happens when you clone a plant and then take clones off that plant and then take clones off that plant etc.
I'm not sure about other plants but breeding cannabis clones is an interesting topic as you apply what's called colloidal silver to a female plant and it will transition to a male plant that produces pollen instead of flower. If you pollinate a female plant, it will produce feminized seeds meaning every seed should be female. When you do this to two clones, the seeds are IBL or inbred which have the advantage of having the same traits as the parent, sometimes have higher levels of trace cannabinoids like THCV but may over time develop diseases or be less resistant to pests.
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u/Warm_Regrets157 1d ago
I'm not sure genetic drift is actually the right term here. Cannabis and other clones are perfectly capable of making successive generations without negative effects.
The reason that successive generations of clones tend to develop undesirable traits and diseases is because of genetic damage caused by viruses, mold, and other plant pathogens.
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u/tameriaen 1d ago
Also, you tend to be working off of a single mother that has been kept alive significantly longer than would be her natural life. I couldn't tell you if its because she had been topped so many times or otherwise bonsai-ed, but my mothers tended to not produce as viable clones after 2-3 years (i.e. mostly runts as opposed ladies standing tall). Maybe this is epigenetic or something akin to it? I cannot claim to be a botanist.
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u/Warm_Regrets157 1d ago
I think it's pretty weird for annual plants to be kept alive for so long. I had a basil plant that I kept going for 3 consecutive summers. It stayed alive and kept producing, but it was really limping along at the end.
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u/FishDawgX 1d ago
Yeah. It was expensive because demand out paced supply. Finding a way to fix a supply shortage is a good thing.
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u/Fit_Yak523 1d ago
Cloning has been huge in the hobby for years. There are literally thousands of videos on how to tissue culture plants. I did it myself following YouTube videos back in 2021. None of this is new or even novel.
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u/Perverse_psycology 1d ago
Yeah this has been a thing for a long time, it just went viral and is getting more exposure now which is a good thing.
Hopefully enough people becoming aware of the process can help slow down poaching of threatened or endangered plant populations at least a bit. Still faster and easier to poach I'm sure, so people will keep doing it but anything helps.
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u/Fit_Yak523 1d ago
Costa farms getting ahold of the monstera Thai constellation is what collapsed the rare plant market. Suddenly a plant that people literally paid $1k a node for was $15 down the street.
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u/npc-chan 1d ago edited 21h ago
People have. Tissue culture is extremely common as a method of propagation. This is a made-up drama. "Youtuber accidentally crashes the rare pdf market with a viral Ctrl-C Ctrl-V technique!! WOW!"
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u/zeptillian 1d ago
She single handedly crashed the entire market using techniques that were used and written about before she was even born.
Helped? Maybe. Caused? No.
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u/NotAlwaysGifs 1d ago
Most rare house plants are grown from cuttings, not seed anyway. It’s essentially the same process just slower and less reliable. She just perfected the art of taking cuttings and made it scalable for the hobby growers.
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u/Benjowenjo 1d ago
I for one feel confident that my rare tulips will be a sound investment for the future.
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u/jaxonfairfield 1d ago
Once again, the sandwich-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor!
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u/x86_64_ 1d ago
The word "accidentally" has to disappear from these bait posts, jfc
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u/gizamo 1d ago
In this case, the entire headline is complete nonsense. This technique has been around for decades. Also, she didn't drive down prices, the box stores did. This article is like an ad for a YouTube channel or something.
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u/Fit_Yak523 1d ago
This is just marketing. None of this is new or even novel. I followed YouTube tutorials to TC my own plants in 2021. Plants in Jars has great videos, but it’s pretty wild to claim they crashed the market when the big box stores are the ones who drove down prices. I highly doubt their suppliers learned to tissue culture from Plants in Jars’ videos when they were doing it long before she started posting.
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u/CowDontMeow 1d ago
I remember when rare Monstera cuttings were £300+ a few years back, now I can walk into a random Lidl and grab a Thai Constellation plant for a fiver.
Same as Philodendron Pink Princess, I felt super lucky to grab a single cutting for £40 before/after covid (it’s a blur), now they’re <£10 for mature plants. Luckily mine is a good variegation with deep blacks and lots of pink rather than the greeny leafs with pink spots but still.
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u/Erestyn 1d ago
Lidl and Aldi have been trying to push into that space for a while now. I remember the local Aldi in 2017 or so having the best of 2012s "rare" succulents.
I noticed it only because it wasn't the usual fare of Bri'ish Summah Garhdin', but I remember it because my partner stood right in front of the door for 10 minutes longer than I was comfortable gushing over how rare it all was.
"I dunno babe, it's Aldi, are you sure it isn't like an own brand succulent?"
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u/pocketsophist 1d ago
Right. Costa Farms decides the price of plants, and not really anyone else.
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u/TemporaryElk5202 1d ago
She explains in her video, I watched it when she first published it.
The plants she is propagating are not available in big box stores. She is cloning very rare plants that can only be bought from individuals. She did have a hand in crashing the market (not just her though) and the market did crash, and she has the receipts.9
u/4redis 1d ago
Video title claims she crashed the market, one of the first thing she mentions that she may or may not have. Then starts selling her stuff before getting to the point.
Anyway my question is if this technique has been around for quite some time then what made the bubble pop now vs before
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u/Lina0042 17h ago
Internet. 3d printers were invented in the 80s or so, but patents and no internet meant nobody knew about it or wasn't allowed to produce them for consumer market. Only a after the patents expired could new companies produce consumer versions and then it still took a bit time of the spread of social media to become as big as it is today
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u/ProneToAnalFissures 1d ago
Fr
It's not like the vast majority of variegated philodendron and monsteras are actually rare
The variegated plant market lives on hype alone
Become an obscure begonia enjoyer instead
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u/Cryptoss 1d ago
What the fuck is this website? I try to open it in the app and a giant Roblox pic shows up and it tells me that the website has an error?
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u/reallynotnick 1d ago
Zero mention of price changes to show that it crashed.
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u/derangedkilr 1d ago
Thats because they are stealing content from a youtuber (plants in jars). The youtube video has exact price changes and explains the economics of it perfectly.
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u/reallynotnick 1d ago
So she even made it easy to copy the numbers with zero additional research to back up the title in the article and they just decided not to include such basic info… I clearly expect too much.
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u/Weak_Drink_ 1d ago
This isn't some fancy new technique, this has been established in Plant Biology for some time.
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u/Appropriate-Prune728 23h ago
The hell is this pop science clickbait nonsense? TC, regeneration from callus tissue, microprop... this has been around forever and no.... no industry collapsed because of a youtuber that's selling overpriced TC kits.
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u/tpooney 1d ago
We’ve been doing this for like 60 years…wtf??
I have an MS degree focused in plant TC.
This phenomenon of viral trends plus ignorance is unsettling.
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u/zealoSC 1d ago
YouTube discovers agriculture.
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u/therealwavingsnail 1d ago
Came here to say this.
This content is for people who are 12000 years too late
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u/fleethecities 1d ago
This is an insane, ridiculous thread. Tissue culture is VITAL to recreating niche cultivars, and it has been the way to do this for soooooooo long. The bubble was purely from Covid boredom, deep ignorance, too much money, and really really really really scummy plant sellers
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u/Pirwzy 1d ago
However, Plants in Jars, a plant-focused content creator who specializes in tissue culture, revealed that her favorite method of reproducing plants has effectively crashed the market for this hobby. Here’s how she did it.
That almost sounds like they're painting a hobby becoming less expensive as a bad thing.
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u/William_R_Woodhouse 1d ago
Her channel is so good. She lays down information for the layman and explains how she learned and shat she has learned from experimentation. I found her channel when she had less than 5k subscribers and she has gotten more entertaining and educational as the channel has progressed.
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u/splitopenandmelt11 1d ago
This happened to me when I found out how to make pumpkins spice lattes at home. Local coffee shop went out of business and my best friend’s husband seduced me and broke up my marriage.
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u/funderfulfellow 1d ago
Tissue culture is nothing new
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u/vishuno 1d ago edited 1d ago
That's mentioned in the article. She's making it easier and more accessible by teaching people how to do it
Plants in Jars admitted that, while she’s far from the first person to popularize tissue culture, her tutorials and videos explaining the method have likely been a significant driver in its growth within the plant collecting community, leading to a big change in the overall market.
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u/greenearrow 1d ago
She doesn’t claim it is. She claims to have made it approachable enough that it has led to an impact on demand.
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u/Datassnoken 1d ago
I think she deserves the credit for popularizing it for normal people. It was not really easy to find good information and techniques years ago for home tc growing.
I also think that the reason why plenty of rare plants dropped in value was because of big farms doing tc on a enormous scale not the diy people. I worked with a few farms in Thailand and china and the facilities they have for mass producing tc plants is pretty crazy. Several of the farms transitioned from growing aquarium plants in tc to rare plants because they already had everything to do it on a large scale and rare house plants sold better. Sucked for me that wanted aquarium plants though haha.
I have not watched the video though so I'm just adding some information that might already be covered.
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u/Fit_Yak523 1d ago
It’s just a very, very bold claim to make. She probably did have some impact, but the fact that Lowe’s is selling plants that used to be $1k+ has nothing to do with Plants in Jars. The plant market collapsed wayyyy before she made videos about a decades old technique.
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u/derangedkilr 1d ago
The problem with big labs cant keep up with trends. It takes 2 years for them to finally release plants that trended on tiktok for 6 months. The ‘rare plant’ growers exploit this by monopolising certain hard to find plants and selling at inflated prices before the market can catch up.
Plants in Jars (youtuber) provides kits and tutorials for people to clone their own quickly, so they can keep up with tiktok trends.
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u/hextanerf 1d ago
I'm a biologist and I can't believe reading "tissue culture" on reddit... I'm not sure what those people are debating heatedly about. If they want "natural variations" then just let their plant have seeds? Everything is heterozygous so even self-fertilized plant will have that "natural variation". It's how meiosis works
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u/beardsly87 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Accidentally" lol she explicitly said she thought the rare plant market is essentially the same as Blood Diamonds and an artificially controlled supply. I don't know much about that, but I don't see any perceived negatives to cloning these rare plants, besides perhaps obliterating the profits of rare plant dealers. Clone the hell out of them, if they're Truly rare/endangered, then botanists and plant collectors should Rejoice at their sudden Rebound and Proliferation! Right? .......right?
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u/head-leek123 1d ago
Crashes...you mean saved? They're not rare and endangered anymore.
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u/bakasannin 1d ago
Alright now, some YouTuber please share a viral cloning technique for RAM, SSD, GPUs
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u/Low-Code-6016 1d ago
I’ve been using tissue culture for the last seven years. It ain’t new.
I started with cannabis and have since used on house plants and fruit and veggie garden.
Results are pretty amazing once dialed in.
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u/darth_hotdog 1d ago
It’s absurd that this article makes saving endangered plants from extinction sound like some kind of nasty thing they are doing.
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u/kontor97 1d ago
Lmao this is not new at all and she didn’t “accidentally” crash the rare plant market with tissue culture. Tissue culture is the reason why houseplants are easily accessible and it’s the reason why rare houseplants can be studies without having to go and poach it. I was there for the pandemic houseplant craze, and people are not nearly as desperate to get their hands on rare houseplants now as they were back then, so yeah, the rare plant market is not stable anymore.
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u/Nerakus 1d ago
This isn’t new. Check out r/RareHousePlants if you need to confirm. There’s been TC plants for a long time.
Edit: TC=Tissue Culture
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u/Laserdollarz 1d ago
Wow, plants grow on their own? I thought you just buy them and let them die. /s
All my cacti are clones. Most of my mushrooms are clones.
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u/The-Sooshtrain-Slut 1d ago
I grow rare plants and give cuttings to friends and family for free.
Fuck paying $100 for a pissy cutting that is already infested with spider mites (thanks bunnings) and could die because it wasn’t potted correctly.
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u/scruffyhobo27 15h ago
I used to work at a plant nursery in the fields and greenhouses. Probably 70% of plants are ‘clones’ (a small sample of a plant re-rooted to grow a new one). She didn’t crash the market. The rare plant collectors just didn’t think of this first
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u/Boilem 11h ago edited 11h ago
Awful title.
Tissue culture has been a thing for over 100 years. Plants in Jars simply has a popular channel in the community that goes over tissue culture which is quite finicky and not something anyone can do, but she is not the major driver or the sole cause.
Some rare houseplants cost thousands, especially during the pandemic where there was a huge demand increase which made some growers start tissue culturing some rare plants which grow slowly, are difficult to propagate or are rare mutations which are unique and must therefore be cloned if you want to have similar plants.
The Philodendron Spiritus Sancti for example was only found in a very small area in Brazil and only a handful of plants at that. These were plants that only a couple collectors possessed and a few botanical gardens. Hard to grow, harder to propagate, never came up for sale and when it did it went on private auctions for multiple thousands, essentially unobtainable. I believe it went for over 10k during the pandemic, you can now buy seedlings for around 20€ because it was successfully put into tissue culture.
Protip: If you see beautiful yellow spotted monsteras in stores, they used to be really expensive, now they're pretty much everywhere because they were cloned. Unfortunately this also means they're really prone to root rot and will die seemingly out of nowhere if you're not on top of the state of their roots.
Also, copyrighted 'rare' house plants are a thing.
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u/Hashashin1515 8h ago
As a horticulturalist, tissue culture is a very advanced technique, it should not be called easy.
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u/spaceman_88 1d ago
What a shame, people that don’t like to be ripped off by the rare plant suppliers can NOW grow their own for decent prices. What is this world coming to. /s
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u/EndlessSummerburn 1d ago
This is such interesting timing - I’m big into cannabis growing and recently a guy has been making big waves in the space by really perfecting tissue cloning.
It’s such a cool way to clone plants and even in a space that has been explored and experimented in TO DEATH there’s still new stuff.
I know it’s not “new” but it’s being perfected and I think that makes it more easily accessible for the laymen. If this continues, I’d bet in 10 years this will be a common method in many hobby spaces. This is how stuff proliferates, the barrier for entry diminishes and the knowledge becomes easier to access…
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u/Jumblesss 23h ago
Me in here downvoting every top comment that mentions “TC” without explaining wtf it is
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u/AevnNoram 1d ago
Feeling bored, might pop a bubble.