Humanity’s magnificent appetite for rare and visually striking plants goes back hundreds of years. In the 17th century, tulip mania famously is rumored to have driven the price of a single bulb up to 10 times the income of an English craftsworker. Victorian England was home to fads like “pteridomania”—an apparently widespread obsession with ferns—and “orchidelirium.” The wealthiest sufferers of these crazes would commission expeditions to bring back exotic specimens for their collections from around the world.

Then, and today, the vast diversity of plants has made these botanical yearnings nearly insatiable. “Collecting can be a sort of lovesickness,” writes Susan Orlean in “Orchid Fever,” her New Yorker article about a modern collector-turned-thief. “If you begin collecting living things, you are pursuing something imperfectible, and even if you manage to find them and then possess them, there is no guarantee they won’t die or change.”

Orlean’s story, which turned into a book and later a movie, focuses on one flower in particular, the ghost orchid, describing the lengths people will go just for a chance to see it. Often they are foiled, she writes: “The species is temperamental, difficult to propagate, rarely seen in cultivation, hard to find in the wild.”

The pink princess philodendron is not rare for any of those reasons, really. The plant is a man-made hybrid, developed in the 1970s by breeding two different philodendron species. The pink splotches, called variegation, come from a genetic mutation. Growers must take cuttings from the plant to propagate new pink princesses, and only from the most variegated parts of a mother plant, which makes them finicky for commercial growing. It takes months of careful work until they’re ready to sell.

At Gabriella Growers, a plant nursery in Florida, Shane Maloy’s family had been growing the pink princess philodendron for decades. For the most part, as Maloy recalls, they would sell a few of the plants at a time here and there, with a 4-inch pot going for $6.50. Then one day, in 2018, a big wholesale order came in. “Before I knew it, we sold half of our [pink princess] plants in two months that spring,” says Maloy, who at 25 now runs the nursery. “Over the following months, I had daily calls from wholesale customers asking if we'd have a new batch ready.”

A plant’s growing popularity was one thing. Then a customer offered to pay Gabriella Growers two dollars more than the list price for each pink princess. That, Maloy says, led him to do something he had never done before, despite practically growing up in a greenhouse: “I Googled a plant for the first time.”

What Maloy found blew his mind. While he’d been busy with his hands in the dirt, the pink princess had become a celebrity, the star of a burgeoning “plantfluencer” scene where collectors can cultivate enormous followings along with their alocasias and monsteras. On YouTube, a series of unboxing videos had materialized, with people cooing over new pink princesses like newborn babies. On Instagram, those who were lucky enough to get their hands on a plant posted them proudly, posed in their homes like a prized artwork. On Etsy, the fandom had created a market for pink princess merchandise, like enamel pins and T-shirts. On Reddit, there were threads of desperate buyers, searching for the plant. Cuttings sold for over $100.

Sensing an opportunity, Maloy set up an Etsy shop just to sell the pink princess. He listed 15 pink princesses, and within 24 hours he sold out. “Then people started messaging me and said, ‘Hey, I know a ton of people who want to buy these. Can I add you to this Facebook group?’” He joined a few of the groups and started selling to people directly. Over the next few months, he raised the price from $6.50 to $50, then again to $100. Each time the plants came back in stock, he sold out immediately. By 2019, he had a waiting list in the thousands for the plant, at one point 5,500 long.