Albert's Greenhouse

As a guy who has his e-mail address online in various places ( I administer the www.aroid.org website as well as www.bacps.org and this here greenhouse site/blog thingy ), and despite my best efforts, I get a lot of e-mail. And aside from the e-mails offering dubious business opportunities and the ability to purchase illicit substances at a discount, I get a surprisingly large number of communications from Southeast Asia from apparently serious people wondering where they can get Anthurium seeds. And I'm not just talking two or three people - this is something like ten people, some of whom are apparently willing to pay big money to get large quantities of seeds shipped over there.

And my job - if you can call it that - is a difficult one. Because these people don't speak very good English. And because their request for Anthurium seed indicates a more complex problem than a simple need for some plant material.

Let me explain: nobody sells Anthurium seed in quantity. Pretty much nobody sells Anthurium seed at all.

All of the Anthuriums you are going to see at your local garden center, at the Walmart, or at your favorite florist are produced through tissue culture by places like Agristarts. The small plants, called liners, produced by these companies are grown out by other companies like Silver Krome Gardens and sold on to bigger retailers. Nowhere in this process is anything resembling a seed. And the vast majority of the plants grown from tissue culture are very standard, very common things. The market demands pretty, and reasonably disposable, Anthurium andreanum hybrids, and that's what gets produced.

The only people who grow Anthurium from seed are breeders of Anthurium andreanum cultivar, and backyard nurseries growing strange plants. And they sell to a very limited market. Produce 20 plants a year of a rare variety and you can sell it for $50 each. Produce 200 plants a year, and you've saturated the market - you might be able to get $5 each, but it's a lot more work. The vast majority of Anthuriums, even those with very interesting foliage, don't do well in the dry and dark atmosphere of our homes.

Growing Anthurium from seed is a tricky business. You usually need two separate infloresences from the mother plant in the right stage of growth in order to even get the seed to set. The seed can take almost a year to mature. The seeds don't store, and don't even ship well. Anthurium berries rot quickly and the seeds die if they dry out. The seeds are small, the seedlings are sensitive, and are very slow growing under most conditions. It's almost always easier to take and root divisions or cuttings than to pollinate an infloresence and grow out the seedlings.

So the vast quantities of seed these folks are looking for don't exist. And even those who do have seed generally have their own uses for it.

The smaller growers are also painfully aware of the effects of market saturation, and may not want to share their propagation materials with someone who could put the plant into tissue culture. It's not so much that they don't want to spread the plant around, but that they want to recoup some of their investment into getting the plant introduced into cultivation in the first place.

For instance, Anthurium warocqueanum and Anthurium veitchii were once very hard to obtain and very expensive. They were propagated by cuttings and seed only. They were put into tissue culture a couple of years ago and are now both common and cheap. In fact, it is difficult to sell them because though they are attractive, they do very poorly in people's homes. You need a greenhouse in order to grow them to their full potential, or even to keep them alive for more than a few months.

Occasionally, the original importer of a plant variety may enter into a revenue sharing agreement with a tissue culture lab in an attempt to get a plant more widely disseminated, but often these plants turn out to be ill-suited for the mass market anyway.

It turns out the economics and practicalities of distributing a rare Anthurium species are a lot more complex than just producing some seed or dumping a species into tissue culture.