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Many of the plants mentioned in this story are no longer rare or expensive, depending on how easy they are to propagate. For example, the article mentions a “Pink Princess” Philodendron. These are not difficult to grow, but the pink variegation is notoriously unstable. In 2019 I sold a small one of these plants for $125. Today you can buy a similar plant for $20-40 on Etsy from a reputable US seller.

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Seems like if you want to make serious money as a breeder you need to get ahead of the wave. I'm surprised atomic gardening isn't more popular. You can take a bunch of plants around some cobalt-60, let it go to seed, explore the mutant progeny for phenotypes of interest. Many commercially significant crops were found using this technique. It's basically a hack for the breeder to introduce phenotypic diversity through mutation where there wasn't any before, within a single growing season to boot. Imagine what you could do with a monstera like this. Maybe you will find some unicorn phenotype like true breeding purple leaves, now that would fetch a price especially if you were the only breeder in the world with these genetics.

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