Prop Culture

Hortikult Digital Solutions, s.r.o. & Nurture System
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Home & Garden
  • Daily

Jos Vanden Abeele, Tanya Quintieri, and Kaylee Ellen are here to spill the plant communi-tea! This is a show for houseplant lovers, collectors, breeders, and hobbyists who want the gossip, the drama, the science, and the real talk about the changing plant community. Get the unpotted secrets, follow the trending drama, and join the mission to build a more sustainable, connected plant community. Email us at propculture@hortikult.com

  1. 3d ago

    S02E23: Muchlis Drama Part 1 , Rooting for Us, Plant Provenance & Salvia messii

    Tanya and Jos, no guest, lots of feelings. Tanya is healing her plants and starting to prep for Corsica. Jos is moving an entire anthurium collection out of a greenhouse he lost on two and a half months’ notice. Plant drama: an Indonesian Anthurium ‘Muchlis’ sold in the US for $3,000, and the post that followed. Tanya talked with Aina, an Indonesian-born chef in the San Francisco Bay Area, about giving credit, “good” gatekeeping, and why “Indo” should never have meant knockoff. Jos tells the story behind the name ‘HU’. Rooting for Us: Plant Provenance launches December 19, and the launch campaign is a friendly competition between ten plant families. Sign up, confirm your email, vote daily, bring your friends. The winning family earns a €100 conservation donation for its society. First standings: Saturday, October 31. News from Peru: Salvia messii, a blue-and-white sage named after Lionel Messi, and Puya ukumari, a bromeliad named for the Andean bear. Casual chat: Are people falling out of love with plants? Hot or Nah: Massonia depressa, a creamy Hoya curtisii, and Arisaema thunbergii. Rate That Weird Plant: Dorstenia gigas, Caladenia lobata, and Eriospermum paradoxum. Support Jos’s greenhouse on Ulule: Join Rooting for Us: plantprovenance.com Follow Prop Culture for new episodes every two weeks, and find us on YouTube, Instagram, and Substack for the full picture, including the images of the plants we rate.

    S02E23: Muchlis Drama Part 1 , Rooting for Us, Plant Provenance & Salvia messii

  2. Oct 13

    S02E22: Anthurium Papa, Lust Lists & the $40K Monstera Side-Eye

    Brian Lagunas, aka Anthurium Papa, joins Tanya and Jos for an episode full of heart and a little chaos. News: The Crop Trust’s report on edible aroids and why collectors might be part of the backup plan; Costa Rica paying landowners to keep forests standing, and measuring recovery by sound; and the Desert Botanical Garden’s rescue center for confiscated plants. Interview: Brian’s path from a fateful Anthurium warocqueanum encounter at Ecuagenera to breeding within a year, his friendship with legendary grower Barry Schwarz, meeting Dr. Tom Croat at our Miami barbecue, why water quality is “crucial,” and how he set out to kick down the gates of a gatekept hobby. Hot take: Should breeders give a whole seed batch one name? Brian says no. Jos disagrees, mostly. Hot or Nah: A Hoya with fuzzy black new leaves, an inappropriately shaped Abelmoschus, and the $40,000 Monstera everyone side-eyed in Miami. Rate That Weird Plant: Brunsvigia orientalis, Utricularia dunlopii, and Paronychia erecta. Follow Brian: @anthuriumpapa on Instagram and YouTube. Follow Prop Culture for new episodes every two weeks, and find us on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ for the full plant-nerd experience.

    S02E22: Anthurium Papa, Lust Lists & the $40K Monstera Side-Eye

  3. Sep 29

    S02E21: Miami Vice(s) — Our First IAS Tropical Plant Expo, Aroid Royalty, Doc Block, Silver Krome & Fairchild Botanical Garden

    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 socotranum Rate That Weird Plant: Haworthia pumila 'Donuts', Verticordia staminosa subsp. cylindracea var. cylindracea, Pachypodium rosulatum subsp. gracilius Follow Prop Culture for new episodes every two weeks, and find us on ⁠YouTube⁠, ⁠Substack⁠, and ⁠Instagram⁠ for the full plant-nerd experience.

    S02E21: Miami Vice(s) — Our First IAS Tropical Plant Expo, Aroid Royalty, Doc Block, Silver Krome & Fairchild Botanical Garden

  4. Sep 9

    S02E20: Interview with Marco Cedeño-Fonseca, Fake Adansonii, Plastic Monsteras, and Tom Croat's Garden

    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/@aroidsociety Next 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.

    S02E20: Interview with Marco Cedeño-Fonseca, Fake Adansonii, Plastic Monsteras, and Tom Croat's Garden

  5. Aug 25

    S02E19: Red Light Special (For Your Plants)

    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.

    S02E19: Red Light Special (For Your Plants)

  6. Aug 13

    S02E18: Coopetition Over Competition with Veronica Moore of Plants Are Therapy

    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 / @plantsaretherapypodcast For the full article and images for this episode, ⁠visit our Substack⁠!

    S02E18: Coopetition Over Competition with Veronica Moore of Plants Are Therapy

  7. Jul 28

    S02E17: Turkish Ice Cream Is Made From Orchids?! Also, We Look at Smuggled Catci & Chernobyl

    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!

    S02E17: Turkish Ice Cream Is Made From Orchids?! Also, We Look at Smuggled Catci & Chernobyl

  8. Jul 14

    S02E16: A Luxury Service Nobody Needs: Dr. Sarah Spaulding on Exporting Plants

    Episode 16 — and it's Hortikult's two-year anniversary, so we're celebrating by talking about paperwork. Our guest is Dr. Sarah Spaulding, evolutionary biologist, Tanya's co-chair on the IAS education committee, and the person behind BOTANOPHILE — the export business that gets rare plants from US growers into collections around the world. Sarah explains what that actually involves: monthly USDA inspections where a stranger examines every plant you own for hours, phytosanitary paperwork, group shipments with 400 plants going to 25 people in different countries, and the immutable law that if your box gets stuck in customs it will be during the worst heatwave or the deepest freeze of the year. She also tells us why she calls it "a luxury service that nobody needs," why you will always be somebody's villain no matter how hard you try, what her Instagram handle apparently means to everyone except her, and why sharing plants is basically a love language. Plus in the news: MIT researchers find that rice seeds can "hear" rain and germinate 30–40% faster because of it; the National Herbarium of Ukraine in Kyiv — 2.3 million specimens, 250 years of history, and a critical resource for Australian botany — issues an urgent call for global support; and Jos reluctantly advertises Cultivar Stitch, his new line of embroidered iron-on plant patches (cultivarstitch.com). Then: Hot or Nah with a fluorescent Begonia, a blue-sheened fern, and Alocasia longiloba 'Black Saturn'. And Rate That Weird Plant, featuring boba-shaped succulents, a plant that looks unmistakably like a rabbit vibrator, and a Euphorbia we should probably apologize for. Adult language, adult tangents, adult plants. As always. CONNECT Substack: ⁠⁠propculture.substack.com⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/prop.culture.podcast⁠Website: ⁠⁠hortikult.com/podcast⁠Connect with us: ⁠⁠propculture@hortikult.com

    S02E16: A Luxury Service Nobody Needs: Dr. Sarah Spaulding on Exporting Plants
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

Jos Vanden Abeele, Tanya Quintieri, and Kaylee Ellen are here to spill the plant communi-tea! This is a show for houseplant lovers, collectors, breeders, and hobbyists who want the gossip, the drama, the science, and the real talk about the changing plant community. Get the unpotted secrets, follow the trending drama, and join the mission to build a more sustainable, connected plant community. Email us at propculture@hortikult.com

Information

  • Creator
    Hortikult Digital Solutions, s.r.o. & Nurture System
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    32
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Hortikult Digital Solutions, s.r.o. & Nurture System
  • Show Website
    Prop Culture

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