YouTuber accidentally crashes the rare plant market with a viral cloning technique

YouTuber ‘Plants in Jars’ is going viral after revealing that she accidentally crashed the rare plant market by using a process called ’tissue culture’ to easily replicate hard-to-find flora.

There’s an entire subculture of rare plant collectors out there who will pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars to get their hands on plants that aren’t available on the general market.

If you can’t get that shrub you’ve been eyeing online at your local Lowe’s, Home Depot, or independently-owned plant nursery, there’s a chance it’s a fairly rare specimen… and that means it’s probably pricey.

However, Plants in Jars, a plant-focused content creator who specializes in tissue culture, revealed that her favorite method of reproducing plants has effectively crashed the market for this hobby. Here’s how she did it.

How one YouTuber helped tank the rare plant trade

To start, we need to explain what ’tissue culture’ is. Tissue culture is a process of plant reproduction, where someone takes a small piece of tissue from a preexisting plant, sterilizes it, and places it in a nutrient-rich gel to help it grow quickly.

This is a super fast and effective way to make new plants from an existing specimen, and Plants in Jars has centered her entire online presence around this method. She even sells tissue culture starter kits on her website with step-by-step instructions on how to use them.

While exciting, this means that basically anyone can mass-produce many rare plant species, rendering their ‘rare’ status on the market, well, not-so-rare anymore.

It has also stirred up a heated debate within the plant collecting community, as tissue-grown plants are essentially clones of each other, preventing the natural genetic variation seen in seed-grown plants.

It’s also put quite a dent in the illicit rare plant market, where plant smuggling across international borders is common. Proponents of tissue culture argue that cloning is a better alternative to this, which can result in rare plant species being harvested into extinction.

Plants in Jars compared this debate to the marketing around lab-grown diamonds and naturally mined diamonds, noting how the demand for mined diamonds fell significantly when lab-grown gems became more popular.

“Tissue culture is what collapses artificial scarcity the fastest, not just because it’s a very effective method for cloning lots and lots of plants and more people are doing it, but also because more people know about it and understand it in the first place.”

Plants in Jars admitted that, while she’s far from the first person to popularize tissue culture, her tutorials and videos explaining the method have likely been a significant driver in its growth within the plant collecting community, leading to a big change in the overall market.

“I think that the era of gatekeeping rare plants is over,” she said. “…even if you do tissue culture very badly, you can still end up with a lot of plants. It’s a very powerful propagation tool.”

Plenty of comments were in agreement with her, with one writing on YouTube, “I’m all for the end of artificial scarcity.”

“Maybe criminals will stop poaching rare and protected plants from the wild if some of the species/varieties become available through tissue culture,” another posited.

“The only people who are angry are the people who want to gatekeep,” another argued.

This is the latest environmental story from a content creator to go viral after popular Twitch streamer Maya Higa raised $1 million for a wolf conservation project in her animal sanctuary earlier this year.