Prop Culture

Tanya and Jos are home from Miami, cold, jet-lagged, and still on speaking terms. This week they spill the tea on their first-ever IAS Tropical Plant Expo.In the news:Hold My Bud: oaks that got eaten by caterpillars one year open their buds about three days later the next. That's enough to starve the hatchlings, and enough to cancel out a decade of climate-driven early spring. Published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.Pilea does math: the vein loops on a Pilea peperomioides leaf form a near-perfect Voronoi diagram around its hydathodes. This could change how botanists think leaf veins form.Who grew your houseplant? Grist reports on the WeCount! campaign asking Costa Farms and big retailers to sign a worker-written code of conduct on heat safety. Ethical sourcing shouldn't stop at the forest edge.Miami:Two visits to Bill Rotolante's Silver Krome GardensA barbecue that turned into a who's-who of the aroid world, with Dr. Tom Croat at the tableBooth lessons from a bootstrapped European startupJos's talk on intersectional hybridization in AnthuriumAroids After DarkA private tour of Dr. Jeff Block's gardenFairchild's outdoor rainforestHot or Nah: Anthurium 'Titan Fingers', Hoya 'Parfum Pagode', Adenium socotranumRate That Weird Plant: Haworthia pumila 'Donuts', Verticordia staminosa subsp. cylindracea var. cylindracea, Pachypodium rosulatum subsp. graciliusFollow Prop Culture for new episodes every two weeks, and find us on ⁠YouTube⁠, ⁠Substack⁠, and ⁠Instagram⁠ for the full plant-nerd experience.

Episode 20 and we finally have an aroid taxonomist in the room. Marco Cedeño Fonseca is a Costa Rican botanist who did his master's on Monstera at the University of Costa Rica and just finished his PhD at the Berlin Botanical Garden — as in, he got the title the day before we recorded and told us at the very end.News: the Thomas B. Croat Aroid Garden was inaugurated in Tabasco, Mexico. A 5-meter plant gets a strong opinion out of Marco about plastic plants in Costa Rica. And a new Typhonium was named in Thailand, which sends us down a hole about why genera keep getting split.Interview: How a forestry student ended up building a greenhouse in his apartment to germinate Monstera seeds; why juveniles are the taxonomic problem; the Monstera everyone calls esqueleto that has never been documented in the wild; what a Costa Rican field botanist does all day in a German DNA lab; and the one Monstera he's never seen.Hot or Nah: Dendrobium Kirkland Nixon 'Bredren', Anthurium warocqueanum × veitchii, Dionaea muscipula 'Medusa'.Rate That Weird Plant: Gethyllis namaquensis, Tecticornia verrucosa, Ranunculus semiverticillatus.Follow Marco on Instagram: @marco_vcfRead about the Croat garden on the IAS Substack: substack.com/@aroidsocietyNext episode: Probably live from the IAS Tropical Plant Expo in Miami.Prop Culture is brought to you by Hortikult's Plant Provenance, PlantCard.io, Plant My Event, Webaceae, and Gifts for Plant People.

Your plant isn't being dramatic when it stretches for the window — it's reading the light. This week Tanya and Jos get into a red-shade-cloth vanilla farm in Hawaii, the real science of phytochrome and shade avoidance, and why cannabis growers manipulate far-red light on purpose. Plus: an AI plant-photo fraud scandal shakes the collector community, a Hawaiian botanist free-solos volcanic cliffs to save endangered plants by hand, two Australian orchids get pulled back from the brink, and Tanya drops a hot take on who actually gets to have an opinion about non-native gardening.In this episode:News — An AI-generated plant photo scandal rocks the collector community; field botanist Steve Perlman free-solos 3,000-ft Hawaiian sea cliffs to rescue endangered native plants; two Australian orchids (the Queen of Sheba orchid and the Rosella spider orchid) get major conservation wins; and a humbling lesson on humidity, monsoons, and what "houseplant" even means depending on where you live.Main Topic: Red Light, Explained — What a lava-red vanilla farm in Hilo taught us about phytochrome, shade avoidance, and why your leggy pothos is just speaking a language plants have used for millions of years — plus how cannabis growers weaponize far-red light for bigger yields and higher THC.Hot Take — Should Europeans stop planting palm trees? Tanya says the people criticizing them should look at their own backyard first.Hot or Nah — Cymbidium goeringii 'Cheonjong', Philodendron 'Jupiter', and Alternanthera ficoidea (Joseph's coat) go under the microscope.Weird Plants — A starfish-shaped Mexican vine (Dictyanthus pavonii), a South African micro-succulent with a flower 20x its own size (Oxalis bullulata), and a spiky Amaryllis relative found in a 64-square-kilometer sliver of the Western Cape (Brunsvigia radula).Follow Prop Culture for new episodes every two weeks, and find us on YouTube, Substack, and Instagram for the full plant-nerd experience.

Tanya's back from Corsica (barely rested, extremely tanned in spirit) and Jos has news about the UK's Plant Heritage — a royal-patronage plant conservation charity with over 600 protected collections, four of which now belong to King Charles III himself. It kicks off a real conversation about colonial extraction in the plant world, plus an update on the Monstera Stan bracket tournament (RIP to your wallet, congrats to Mexican Mint) and a citizen science detour into bird counts and Cape Cod sunfish patrols.Then Veronica Moore — @brownskinplantmama, host of the brand-new Plants Are Therapy podcast — joins for a conversation that goes way deeper than plant care. She tells the story, for the first time publicly, of why Brown Skin Plant Mama started faceless and anonymous in 2020, and how a year of talk therapy and a lot of grief turned plants into something sacred. She breaks down her "plants as a mental health mirror" philosophy, talks candidly about representation in the plant and wellness space, and unpacks the "coopetition" mindset she lives by — community over competition, always.Stick around for Hot or Nah (an Alocasia, a Nepenthes, and a Begonia with a name none of us should have googled live) and Rate That Weird Plant, where a Ceropegia earns two perfect 10s for looking like something out of the Addams Family.🔗 Find Veronica: @brownskinplantmama / @plantsaretherapypodcastFor the full article and images for this episode, ⁠visit our Substack⁠!

Hosts this episode: Jos Vanden Abeele & Kaylee Ellen(Tanya Quintieri is off the grid in Corsica this week — back next episode.)No guest interview this time, so Jos and Kaylee fill the runtime with a stacked news round and two full plant-rating segments.Tanya's off soaking up Corsica, so it's just Jos and Kaylee this week — and they've brought a full plate of plant news. Top of the list: the strange, orchid-based science behind stretchy Turkish ice cream, and why making it is quietly devastating wild orchid populations across Anatolia. From there, the two cover the closure of legendary Florida nursery Tropiflora, a wild story of rare orchids thriving inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a cactus-smuggling bust at a Brazilian airport, and a deep dive into how aroids actually climb. Plus: a hot take on Anthurium pricing, and two full rounds of Hot-or-Not and Weird Plant of the Week.For the full article and images for this episode, visit our Substack!