Monstera Peru
90% of my plant collection consists of everyday indoor plants you can get at every nursery. Except for one very large peace lily, all of my plants were probably less than R180.
I watch a lot of rare house plant YouTube, just admiring their rare collector plants, not really wanting those plants for myself, until I saw the Monstera Peru. Small leaves, not deliciosa size, more adansonii, but with this really cool almost dragon scale texture. I became obsessed with this plant, I watched every video out there about it, but I knew I'd never own one. It's really tough to get collector plants in South Africa, especially at an affordable price. So I just kept admiring from a distance.
I have a favourite nursery in Cape Town. It's a smallish, almost messy, place. Run by this lovely lady with her very friendly cat. Here you can find plants that are usually not stocked at a Stodels or a Starke Ayres. I got an Oxalis triangularis there, I'll make a post about her if she survives her winter dormancy. So I like going to this nursery every few months just to walk through this beautifully designed place and see some oddities.
I went there one day with the intention of buying an Aluminium plant, I'd recently killed mine and she sells them for like R45. And there in the greenhouse was about 5 Monstera Peru. I was speachless. How were they here? I stared at them for about 5 seconds, grabbed one of them that had a new leaf growing, bought it and left. It cost me R245, my most expensive plant, but really cheap considering I'd never seen them before.
A week later I saw them pop up on some online stores in Cape Town, Plantify, Click n Plant, all for about R350. So I was quite chuffed.
I've had this plant for about a month and a half now. I took this photo right when I got it, now it's got another new leaf and some more growth popping through. I love how light green the new leaves are compared to the others. She sits on my work desk where I can get distracted by her during long meetings and touch her cool dragon scales. Oddly I now feel like a real plant collector, now that I have something other than pothos and peace lily, even though I have 100+ plants...