A Plant Craze Can Sell a Leaf for Millions of Rupiah. Then the Price Falls Off a Cliff. Here Is the Pattern
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5 min read
In the mid-2000s, a thumb-sized anthurium cutting could cost Rp350,000 (Liputan6). Liputan6 says some fans were willing to sell their cars to buy more. Then the price fell.
This is the story of every plant craze. A leafy plant becomes a status item, prices climb, and then supply catches up. This post walks through what the reports say about Indonesia's plant crazes, and what the pattern means if you hold anything bought on hype.
A plant craze is a short period when a particular ornamental plant sells for far more than it costs to grow. People buy it because prices are rising, not because they want the plant.
It looks like investing for two reasons. Prices go up fast, and sellers talk about "returns". But a plant pays no interest and no dividend. It also grows. That growth is the problem, as you will see below.
Gelombang cinta ("wave of love") is a type of anthurium, a plant with big, ribbed leaves. Liputan6 reports that it was popular between 2006 and 2008, with the peak in 2007. At the time, a thumb-sized plant could cost Rp350,000.
Fimela adds that sellers priced it by the leaf, not by the pot. A small leaf could cost hundreds of thousands of rupiah and a large one could cost millions.
Then the fever faded. Fimela says it faded "for no clear reason". An older detik report gives one number for how far it fell: a three-week-old jemani anthurium (a related variety) that sold for about Rp1 million at the peak was then worth about Rp10,000 (a detik report seen only through a search summary, so the exact article and date are not confirmed).
That is a fall of about 99%, from the plain arithmetic of 10,000 against 1,000,000. Treat it as one dealer's quote, not a market index. No price index for gelombang cinta exists in the sources we could reach.
The pattern came back during the 2020 pandemic, when many people stayed home and took up houseplants.
The star was janda bolong, a monstera with holes in its leaves. Reports in 2020 described asking prices in the tens of millions of rupiah and even "hundreds of millions" for special plants. A Kompas TV story from 28 September 2020 quoted Syariful Mubarok, a lecturer at Padjadjaran University's agriculture faculty. He said the plant was not hard to grow, and called the price "just a trading game".
He also pointed back to anthurium. A professor from Gadjah Mada University, Purnomo, said the high prices were driven by the trend and used by sellers to make a profit.
Cheaper plants rose too. A trader in Malang told Kumparan in 2020 that aglaonema, which sold for Rp35,000 to Rp50,000 before the pandemic, could rise to about three times that. Aglaonema is a leafy plant with red or pink patterns.
Here is the honest part. We did not find a dated price series showing how far janda bolong, monstera or aglaonema fell after 2020. The plan for this post assumed a clean crash, and the sources do not show one.
What we did find is a direction. An IDXChannel piece, which carries no clear date and no figures, says janda bolong is easy to propagate and now fills every plant shop, so its price keeps dropping.
Overseas data points the same way. Australian coverage from 2019 put a 25 cm Monstera "Thai Constellation" at about A$300. Horticulturist Graham Ross later said on Better Homes and Gardens that the price had fallen to around A$100, and a Bunnings listing showed A$99 (Better Homes and Gardens; the dates of those two lines are not shown). A German report found the same plant at EUR 14.99 in a Kaufland supermarket (echo24).
These are search summaries of pages we could not open in full. Check them before relying on any of them.
Plants multiply. Here is an illustration with made-up numbers, to show the mechanism.
| Year | Growers | Cuttings per grower | Plants on the market |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10 | 5 | 50 |
| 2 | 100 | 5 | 500 |
| 3 | 1,000 | 5 | 5,000 |
If demand stays flat, 100 times more plants must share the same buyers. The price has to fall. These numbers are not real data. They only show why a plant is a weak store of value once many people can grow it.
The same signs show up in the sources above, and in our post on the batu akik gemstone boom and bust:
Our post on collectibles and liquidity risk explains why the price you see and the price you can actually get are often far apart.
If you bought plants, gemstones or other collectibles, record them at what you could sell them for today, not what a seller told you they were worth. Open your NetWort Dashboard and check that your total net worth is not leaning on a number from a hype period.