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

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A YouTuber named ‘Plants in Jars’ has become popular online after unintentionally disrupting the rare plant market. She was able to easily grow difficult-to-find plants using a technique called ‘tissue culture,’ which allowed her to make many copies.

A dedicated community of plant collectors exists, and they’re willing to spend a lot of money – sometimes hundreds or even thousands of dollars – to obtain unusual plants that aren’t commonly sold in stores.

If you’re having trouble finding a particular plant at stores like Lowe’s, Home Depot, or local nurseries, it might be an unusual variety – and likely expensive.

A popular plant content creator named Plants in Jars, who focuses on tissue culture, shared that her preferred plant propagation technique has become so popular it’s caused a shortage of necessary supplies. Here’s a look at what she does.

How one YouTuber helped tank the rare plant trade

Let’s begin by explaining tissue culture. It’s a way to grow new plants from a small piece of an existing plant. This involves sterilizing the tissue and placing it in a special gel containing nutrients, which encourages rapid growth.

Growing new plants from existing ones is quick and easy, and Plants in Jars has built her online brand around this technique. She offers starter kits and detailed instructions on her website to help you do it yourself.

This is great news, but it also means that rare plant species could become much more common as they become easier to grow and sell, potentially losing their special, ‘rare’ value.

This has sparked a lot of discussion among plant collectors. Because tissue-grown plants are genetically identical clones, they lack the natural diversity you’d find in plants grown from seeds.

This has significantly disrupted the illegal rare plant trade, which often involves smuggling plants across borders. Those who support tissue culture believe that cloning is a preferable solution, as it prevents the over-collection of rare plants that could lead to their extinction.

Plants in Jars drew a parallel to the marketing battle between lab-grown and natural diamonds, pointing out that demand for mined diamonds dropped considerably once lab-grown options gained traction.

Tissue culture is quickly becoming the best way to overcome plant shortages. This is due to its efficiency in creating many identical plants, and also because more growers are learning about and adopting the technique.

Okay, so Plants in Jars isn’t the first person to mess around with tissue culture, but honestly, her videos and guides have totally blown up its popularity in the plant community. I’ve noticed a huge difference in what’s available and how people are getting plants – she’s really changed the game, and the whole market feels different now because of it.

She believes the days of keeping rare plants exclusive are coming to an end. Even if someone isn’t skilled at tissue culture, they can still produce a large number of plants, making it a remarkably effective way to propagate them.

I was scrolling through the comments, and so many people agreed with her! Someone on YouTube even said exactly what I was thinking: “I’m totally on board with getting rid of artificial scarcity.” It’s awesome to see others feel the same way.

Someone suggested that if rare and protected plants were grown using tissue culture and became more readily available, it might discourage people from illegally collecting them in the wild.

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

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2025-12-03 21:49