39. Houseplants

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things – Episode 39: Houseplants

Host: Zachary Crockett (Freakonomics Network)
Date: May 14, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the surprisingly vast and dynamic world of houseplants—a $2 billion per year industry in the U.S. Host Zachary Crockett unpacks how houseplants became big business, the fierce competition to develop and patent new varieties, and the pivotal roles played by major growers, plant hunters, and hobbyist breeders. Through engaging interviews, Crockett explores the blend of tradition, scientific innovation, and cutthroat commerce that underlie the humble potted plant.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. From Backyard Beginnings to Botanical Breakthroughs

• Brian & Sarah Williams of Brian’s Botanicals started their rare plant nursery in their backyard, fueled by Brian's early exposure to plant collecting through his father.
  • Quote: “My dad has always been into plants, and he started the nursery out of our backyard when I was a kid.” – Brian Williams [00:54]
• Brian’s discovery of the plant Colocasia Redemption was a eureka moment, illustrating the ongoing hunt for big commercial hits in rare houseplants.
  • Quote: “We were walking out through the field and... all of a sudden there’s a big giant pink starburst in the center of a black leaf and you run around thinking you’re going to be a millionaire.” – Brian Williams [01:23]

2. The Rise & Reach of Costa Farms

• Costa Farms is one of the world’s biggest houseplant growers, with a mission to make houseplants affordable and accessible.
  • Quote: “Three of our biggest customers are Lowe’s, Home Depot, Walmart... as well as a large number of grocery stores and independent garden centers.” – Justin Hancock [03:28]
• With over 5,200 acres of growing land, Costa dominates both staple and novel varieties. Their scale also brings criticism:
  • Quote: “The puppy mill of houseplant growers.” – Justin Hancock [04:02]

3. Finding, Testing, and Torturing New Plants

• The process for bringing new houseplants to market is scientific and rigorous:
  • Sourcing: Involves “plant hunters” like Mike Rimland who work with global partners rather than wild collection [04:39].
  • Testing: Plants endure extreme home conditions—including the “closet test”—to ensure survivability for the average consumer [05:35].
    • Quote: “Mike… will put it in an air conditioned closet for two weeks and not do a single thing to it, and then observe it…” – Justin Hancock [05:35]
    • Joke/Reality Check: “So you’re sort of putting it in a torture chamber.” – Zachary Crockett [06:00]
      “Exactly. Don’t necessarily love that terminology, but it’s accurate.” – Justin Hancock [06:03]
• Even with this effort, some plants are sold at a loss to keep customers engaged—the “thrill of the hunt” is essential to retail appeal [07:19].

4. Shifting Demand & the Rare Plant Gold Rush

• The pandemic and the rise of plantfluencers gave houseplants a sudden jolt of popularity, especially among young people [07:55].
  • Quote: “This is the biggest plant boom that anyone’s ever seen.” – Brian Williams [07:55]
• Enthusiasts now seek niche, hard-to-find plants that aren’t available from large retailers.
  • Quote: “A lot of our customers want the newest thing. They don’t want to find their plants at Home Depot or Lowe’s. They want something different.” – Sarah Williams [11:20]

5. The Science of Breeding & the Gamble of Patents

• The former “glory days” of plant collecting involved wild (and sometimes riskier) adventures abroad; now, cross-breeding and genetics rule.
  • Quote: “I mean, it’s basically plant sex. It’s a numbers game.” – Brian Williams [12:33]
• Creating a new houseplant variety can take years, and patenting is expensive and risky ($4,000–$8,000 per plant), but the payoff for hits is huge [12:59, 13:13].
  • Example: The rare philodendron Spiritus Sancti once sold for $22,000 per plant [13:32].

6. Tissue Culture: Democratizing—and Deflating—the Market

• Tissue culture allows for rapid, mass propagation of rare plants, drastically reducing prices and exclusivity [14:08].
  • Quote: “Within a year or two, you can produce 100,000 plants or more.” – Brian Williams [14:08]
• But tissue culture creates a conundrum: prices plummet, killing the rarity premium. Brian Williams describes how the Spiritus Sancti market collapsed [14:49].
  • Quote: “The price has dropped so dramatically that people won’t even touch it…” – Brian Williams [14:49]

7. Risk, Rarity, and the Art of Timing

• Labs can manipulate scarcity by controlling how many tissue-cultured plants reach the market. The story of the overpriced Monstera ‘Thai Constellation’ illustrates this [15:23].
  • Quote: “There were relatively small numbers of it going out... I saw some people that were selling it online... for like 12, 1500 dollars each.” – Justin Hancock [15:23]
• Growers face risk in deciding when—or whether—to buy and resell rare plants before prices implode.
  • Quote: “If I spent $800 to buy this cutting, I’ve grown this cutting out, am I going to be able to beat everybody else and make my money off of it?” – Justin Hancock [16:22]

8. Patience is a Virtue

• Brian’s unique approach to the market: buy up and sit on stock until the rarity cycle swings back in favor of scarcity.
  • Quote: “If you sit on them for two or three years, the price drops, everybody quits, and then nobody can find it again and everybody wants it again.” – Brian Williams [16:43]

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Notable Moments & Quotes

• On Breeding New Hybrids:
  “It’s just a whole process of getting the right genetic material to the point where I like it. You definitely need to know what’s out there. And then you also have to kind to be imaginative enough to figure out what the market needs, even if they don’t know they need it.” – Brian Williams [12:33]

• On Retail Psychology:
  “It gives people a reason to go to the stores and look. You know, with plant enthusiasts, they talk about, like, the thrill of the hunt.” – Justin Hancock [07:19]

• On Market Volatility:
  “You see the price usually start to come down and people kind of panic a little bit. But for me... I’ve seen this come and go.” – Brian Williams [16:43]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Brian's Botanicals & Early Days: 00:48–01:39
• Costa Farms’ Mass-Market Dominance: 03:14–04:39
• Plant Torture Testing & Retail Dynamics: 05:03–07:32
• Pandemic-Driven Plant Craze & New Generation: 07:32–08:01, 10:38–11:31
• Wild West of Plant Collecting/Hybridizing: 11:31–12:59
• Patenting and High Stakes: 12:59–13:32
• Tissue Culture Changes Everything: 13:55–14:49
• Scarcity Games and Price Strategy: 15:23–16:43

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The Hosts’ Final Notes (Light, Humorous Close)

• Zachary Crockett asks Justin Hancock if he’s like the rest of us with houseplants:
  • “Do you kill houseplants like the rest of us?” – Zachary Crockett [17:33]
  • “Oh, absolutely.” – Justin Hancock [17:33]

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Summary

This episode of The Economics of Everyday Things reveals that the humble houseplant sits at the intersection of nostalgia, scientific innovation, human psychology, and global commerce. As breeders and mega-growers navigate cycles of boom and bust—sometimes chasing, sometimes manufacturing, and sometimes outsmarting trends—the economics of these everyday greenery are anything but simple. For collectors, growers, and retailers, the game is as much about timing and storytelling as it is about soil and sunlight. And, yes, even the experts sometimes let their own houseplants die.

Transcript

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[Zachary Crockett]

For Brian Williams, plants are a way of life.

[Brian Williams]

My dad has always been into plants, and he started the nursery out of our backyard when I was a kid. I kind of grew up playing in the backyard jungle with all these tropicals and stuff.

[Zachary Crockett]

Today he runs a business called Brian's Botanicals with his wife, Sarah. They sell rare houseplants over the Internet and out of their store in Louisville, Kentucky, and they're constantly on the hunt for new and unusual plant breeds.

[Brian Williams]

I remember I bred this new one called Colocasia Redemption, and we were walking out through the field and they were only maybe a foot tall, and all of a sudden there's a big giant pink starburst in the center of a black leaf and you run around thinking you're going to be a millionaire.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Williamses have good reason to believe there's big money in houseplants. According to the National Gardening association, sales of indoor plants and accessories nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021. Houseplants are now a $2 billion year industry, and according to big shots in the plant world, the competition to breed the next big thing has never been more intense.

[Justin Hancock]

Some of the breeders, when they come out with a new plant and they bring it to one of the local shows, you know they may be selling it for 10 or $15,000 because this is the only one of that plant in existence right now.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today Houseplants. Keeping plants inside the home is an idea that goes back at least a few hundred years. During the Victorian era, the bourgeoisie turned their living quarters into veritable jungles of ferns and parlor palms. The fad cooled in the early 20th century but it picked up again during and after World War II, when houseplant propagation was streamlined and offices were designed to look more homey. The hippie and environmental movements in the 1960s and 70s helped popularize indoor foliage even more. But houseplants only became a serious commercial product in the past few decades. And that's largely thanks to one company.

[Justin Hancock]

We're a family run farm. We're a little bit on the big side.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's Justin Hancock. He's the director of research and development at Costa Farms. You've probably encountered their houseplants, even if you don't know it.

[Justin Hancock]

Three of our biggest customers are Lowe's, Home Depot, Walmart. But you can certainly find Costa Farms plants at places like Ikea and Costco, as well as a large number of grocery stores and independent garden centers.

[Zachary Crockett]

Costa is one of the biggest houseplant growers in the world, with more than 5,200 acres of land across Florida, north and South Carolina and the Dominican Republic. Their aim is to make houseplants affordable for everyone. But it's a pursuit that has earned them a few unfriendly nicknames in the plant community.

[Justin Hancock]

The puppy mill of houseplant growers.

[Zachary Crockett]

Jeez, that's pretty brutal. The company sells hundreds of plant varieties.

[Justin Hancock]

The Costa Farms houseplant portfolio is kind of split into two camps. You've got the tried and true that we've been growing for decades. Golden Pothos, heartleaf philodendron, snake plant. And then you've got the brand new things. Zamia colchis. It's a really cool plant from Africa. It almost looks like it's plastic. It has these thick, rubbery leaflets and, you know, so it brings this, hey, this is a plant you practically can't kill. And it's stylish.

[Zachary Crockett]

At the same time, Costa employs an in house plant hunter named Mike Rimland. He travels the world in search of exotic plants that will grow well and have mass appeal.

[Justin Hancock]

We don't harvest plants from the wild. We work with other growers. We work with backyard breeders. You know, we go to plant markets, trade shows, wherever there's the possibility of finding something new.

[Zachary Crockett]

When Mike Rimlund finds a new species with potential, he brings back something called a mother plant or a stock plant. Costa uses it to propagate hundreds of others just like it. One of the most important things the company looks for in a new plant is domestic durability.

[Justin Hancock]

It has to grow well in the average home. If you can't grow it successfully, then there's no point in us bringing it to market.

[Zachary Crockett]

To test plants for hardiness, Costa sometimes puts them in the actual homes of Costa employees.

[Justin Hancock]

We have different house types we test them in. And then Mike also has what he calls the closet test, where he will put it in an air conditioned closet for two weeks and not do a single thing to it, and then observe it, how it comes out. And, you know, that's a good indicator of, hey, you know, this may not do well in the average home if it can't hold up to, you know, this little bit of no light and infrequent watering.

[Zachary Crockett]

So you're sort of putting it in a torture chamber.

[Justin Hancock]

Exactly. Don't necessarily love that terminology, but it's accurate.

[Zachary Crockett]

Once a plant survives the closet torture, it also has to stand up to shipping conditions. Costa's plants travel long distances in trucks from the farms to store shelves.

[Justin Hancock]

And then it has to hold up at retail long enough to have a chance to buy it. So once a plant makes it through all of those tests and we say, okay, this is going to be a good one, then we go through market tests to make sure it's actually going to sell before we start bulking up numbers.

[Zachary Crockett]

Costa sells its plants wholesale to nurseries and big box retailers. And after all that work is said and done, you can find one of their snake plants or ferns for around 20 to 30 bucks. For certain plants, Costa won't even turn a profit.

[Justin Hancock]

Some of these plants, it costs us more to be able to grow it than the wholesale price that we sell it for, but they're essentially subsidized by other plants that grow faster and can make up for them. It tends to be certain hanging basket varieties, especially Hoyas, that fall into that category where it's just impossible to be able to grow it at the price that the retailer wants to be able to retail it at.

[Zachary Crockett]

Why even sell them then?

[Justin Hancock]

It gives people a reason to go to the stores and look. You know, with plant enthusiasts, they talk about, like, the thrill of the hunt about going to the store and what am I going to find this time? There's that little bit of magic.

[Zachary Crockett]

During the pandemic, when everyone was stuck at home, more people sought out that magic. In the past few years, houseplants have seen an enormous influx of new customers, particularly young people. A wave of plant influencers on social media are driving trends, and rare plants, the ones you can't find at Home Depot, are getting more attention than ever.

[Brian Williams]

This is the biggest plant boom that anyone's ever seen.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's coming up.

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[Zachary Crockett]

Brian Williams has been Running Brian's botanicals for 25 years. But in recent times, he's noticed a shift in the market.

[Brian Williams]

It's one thing when people come in, they're like, I want to houseplant. But it's another thing when some young girl come in and she's like, I want a Rifidophora Tetrasperma.

[Zachary Crockett]

Williams and his wife Sarah have leaned into this demand by specializing in rare plants, the stuff that's not on the mass market.

[Sarah Williams]

So we have Alocasia, Kaching Mask, Cannamaui Punch, Colocasia, Bikini Tini, Colocasia Redemption, Colocasia Black Ripple. Our new one we released today, Colocasia, Cleopatra's Kiss. A lot of our customers want the newest thing. They don't want to find their plants at Home Depot or Lowe's. They want something different.

[Zachary Crockett]

Finding these new plants can be a bit of a journey. When Brian was first coming up in the plant world, the older folks in the business would tell him wild stories of trudging through jungles in the 1970s and 80s.

[Brian Williams]

I mean, that's the glory days of plant collecting. You could just go to about any country and my friends would take, you know, four suitcases, and when they left, they would leave all their clothes with the locals and everything, just what they had on their back, and then fill it with plants and then take them back and put them in their collections. And that's how it normally was for many years. But restrictions of bringing stuff in and bugs and everything has changed that.

[Zachary Crockett]

These days, the process is less Indiana Jones and more science nerd. Brian frequents botanical gardens, reserves and nurseries, sometimes abroad, sometimes in the us he looks for species with certain characteristics he likes. Then he takes them home and cross pollinates them in the hopes of creating a new super breed that the world has never seen.

[Brian Williams]

I mean, it's basically plant sex. It's a numbers game. And it's just a lot of trial and error to see what you're going to get. Some plants will take me 2 to 12 years to breed. So it's just a whole process of getting the right genetic material to the point where I like it. You definitely need to know what's out there. And then you also have to kind to be imaginative enough to figure out what the market needs, even if they don't know they need it.

[Zachary Crockett]

When Brian thinks he's got the next big thing, he applies for a plant patent, an intellectual property, right, that protects new varieties. This can cost four to eight thousand dollars per plant, and it's a Gamble.

[Sarah Williams]

We put all our work in up front, and it works or it doesn't work, so we don't get paid until the back end when the other people actually purchase the plants to grow themselves.

[Zachary Crockett]

When all goes well, the payoff can be worth it, because in its early days, a new houseplant can fetch big bucks.

[Brian Williams]

There was a plant called Spirit of Sancti. I mean, I was after this plant for 10, 20 years. It's a philodendron that was found on one farm in Brazil. It has a long, narrow leaf, looks like a sword that hangs down, and it's maybe about three to four feet long. I think at one point, those plants were selling for $22,000.

[Zachary Crockett]

But a relatively new trend in houseplant science has threatened the lucrative nature of rare plants. It's a process called tissue culture, and it's kind of like a cheat code for propagating plants at scale.

[Brian Williams]

Tissue culture is a process where you can take a small piece of plant material and you hit it with different hormones, and. And the hormones will tell the plant material to either bud out or produce roots or produce leaves. And within a year or two, you can produce 100,000 plants or more.

[Zachary Crockett]

Tissue culture labs around the world are now investing in the development of newhouse plants. And once those rare and incredibly expensive plants are mass produced in a lab, the economic equation changes dramatically for rare house plant growers. Take, for instance, that Spiritus sancti plant that once sold for $22,000.

[Brian Williams]

The price has dropped so dramatically that people won't even touch it, even though it's one of the most beautiful plants you could possibly imagine. I think everybody's just, like, worried to see how low it will go.

[Zachary Crockett]

For big growers who want to sell plants as affordably as possible, tissue culture is a welcome development. But it doesn't always work as planned. Justin Hancock of Costa Farms says that sometimes the labs have their own incentive for controlling production. He recalls a recent story about a plant known as the Thai Constellation.

[Justin Hancock]

Thai Constellation is perhaps the queen of houseplants. Right now, it's relatively slow growing. It's really big. It's really eye catching. It's really gorgeous when it's grown well. And my understanding is that one guy in Thailand had a tissue culture lab, and he was controlling the numbers, and there were relatively small numbers of it going out. And so the prices of it were really, really high. And Costa Farms looked at doing it. We were working with a lab. Unfortunately, things didn't work out. And it was a giant, giant, giant letdown. For the plant parents who were aching to be able to see Thai constellation come to them at an affordable price. I saw some people that were selling it online in a 10 inch diameter pot for like 12, 1500 dollars each.

[Zachary Crockett]

These complicated pricing dynamics create a dilemma for rare plant growers.

[Justin Hancock]

If I spent $800 to buy this cutting, I've grown this cutting out, am I going to be able to beat everybody else and make my money off of it? Or is the value of this plant going to decrease so much because nobody's willing to pay the price that I need to make my money back on it?

[Zachary Crockett]

But Brian Williams has his own way of navigating the market.

[Brian Williams]

You see the price usually start to come down and people kind of panic a little bit. But for me, I've been in the business for a while, I've seen this come and go. What I like to do is to spy as many as possible and sit on them. If you sit on them for two or three years, the price drops, everybody quits, and then nobody can find it again and everybody wants it again.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Julie Kanfer and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rapson. I'm just curious, do you kill houseplants like the rest of us?

[Justin Hancock]

Oh, absolutely.

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[Zachary Crockett]

Don't worry, you got this.

[Sarah Williams]

Whoa.

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[Zachary Crockett]

I did it.

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