"Collecting can be a sort of lovesickness," journalist Susan Orlean wrote in the latter part of the last century. "If you begin collecting living things, you are pursuing something imperfectable, and even if you manage to find them and then possess them, there is no guarantee they won't die or change."
Orlean's observations were about hardcore orchid collectors, people who had once been "seemingly normal" before they cultivated a willingness to risk literally everything to get their hands on the rarest members of the Orchidaceae family. Twenty-five years later, plant obsessives are still out there, but instead of, say, shoving flowers into pillowcases during a midday swamp raid, they can send DMs about whatever they're into, join a nursery's lengthy waiting list, or place an eye-watering bid on an auction site.
Just last weekend, an anonymous New Zealander paid NZD $8,150 (the equivalent of USD $5,291) for an "extremely rare variegated Rhaphidophora tetrasperma" on the auction site Trade Me. The sale set a new record for the most expensive houseplant to ever be sold on the platform (and the final purchase price came out to roughly $1,325 per leaf).