Just to fuel the fires here, I went to a plant sale at a guy's private garden last weekend. There was a vendor there with a few little pots with starts of Pink Princess in them. 3in. pots, plants maybe 6in. tall. $200 each. My friend and I laughed out loud, she said "I have a Pink Princess that's 3ft tall and I could make 10 divisions like that out of the babies in the pot". And she got her plant at Ace Hardware a couple of years ago for $20.
The shoe dropped when my garden helper came to work yesterday, and I was telling her about those plants. She said "was this at Rob's place?" and I said it was. She said she had given those plants to Rob for FREE! Good Grief.
They're not rare plants, they propagate easily, people can buy them at a big box store or a hardware store garden center. What are people thinking?? I have to figure it's something to do with people marketing plants online, and plant nuts not going shopping at actual nurseries as much as they used to. It's easy to list a picture of a beautiful big plant, put the word "Rare!" in the headline and put a huge price tag on it. Some fool will buy it . . . and when it arrives, it's a tiny little start.
We need more plant swaps to be happening, and we need more people to start going shopping, and trading plants again. This idiocy will stop once things get back to normal, I hope.
