Elusive plants are big business in the criminal underworld – but when institutions like the Royal Horticultural Society shine a spotlight on the latest botanical sensation, are they inadvertently painting a target on it?
Every spring, for a few precious weeks on a remote stretch of moorland in northern England, a lone warden pitches a tent in a field and does not leave. He is not birdwatching. He is not camping for pleasure. He is guarding a single flower — the last known wild lady’s slipper orchid (Cypripedium calceolus) in the United Kingdom — against the possibility that someone will come in the night and steal it.
The scene sounds like the premise of an eccentric novel. But to those who work in botanical conservation, it is simply the logical conclusion of a problem that has stalked the horticultural world for centuries and is now, in the age of social media, online marketplaces, and transnational criminal networks, reaching crisis point. Rare plants are worth a fortune to the right buyer. And the rarest plants on earth have, for that very reason, been hunted, poached, and smuggled with a ruthlessness that would not be out of place in a wildlife crime documentary about rhino horn.
Against this backdrop, a recurring and delicate question confronts institutions like the Royal Horticultural Society, whose annual Chelsea Flower Show remains the most watched horticultural event on the planet. When the RHS — or any prominent botanical body — draws attention to a rare, coveted, or newly discovered species, are they celebrating it? Or are they inadvertently signposting it for thieves?
A History Written in Theft
The love affair between collectors and rare orchids has always had a criminal dimension. The Victorians called it “orchidelirium” — a mania that gripped Britain’s wealthy classes as the empire imported spectacular blooms from the tropics, and which produced some of history’s most audacious acts of horticultural theft. Collectors hired professional “plant hunters” to scour jungles, sometimes deliberately destroying or concealing populations they had raided to prevent rivals from following them. Rarity was not merely a quality to be admired. It was manufactured, strategically — and it drove prices up.
That logic has not changed. What has changed is the scale, the reach, and the organisation of the market that exploits it.
Consider Rothschild’s slipper orchid — Paphiopedilum rothschildianum — the so-called Gold of Kinabalu. Known informally as the King of Orchids, this extraordinary plant blooms on the slopes of Mount Kinabalu in the Malaysian state of Sabah, its long horizontal petals splayed like the arms of a starfish, striped in burgundy and cream. It is, by any reckoning, one of the most spectacular flowering plants on earth. It is also critically endangered. The IUCN Red List estimates that fewer than 50 mature specimens remain in the wild. A single stem can fetch as much as $5,000 on the black market. And despite growing in a protected national park, its remaining populations continue to shrink — not from habitat loss alone, but from deliberate, targeted poaching by collectors who know exactly what they are looking for and exactly why it is valuable.
The orchid’s predicament illustrates with particular sharpness how public fame can become a conservation liability. When a newly discovered Paphiopedilum species, Paphiopedilum canhii, was first described and published in scientific literature in 2010, the response from the collector community was immediate and devastating. Within months, according to researchers, just one per cent of the known wild population remained. The act of naming it — of announcing its existence to the world — had functioned like a starting pistol for a race to possess it.
The Spotlight Problem
This is the paradox that haunts botanical institutions. Science depends on publication. Conservation depends on public engagement. And public engagement, by its nature, creates demand.
The Royal Horticultural Society has long wrestled with this tension. The RHS Plant Finder, its celebrated annual directory of over 64,000 plants and where to buy them, is the closest thing horticulture has to a bible — a document consulted by professionals and enthusiasts alike, which in recent editions has contained more than 1,400 species never previously listed. Each new entry is, in some sense, a flag planted in the ground: this plant exists, and it is available.
For the vast majority of entries, that information is unproblematic. But for a small subset of species — those so rare in the wild that any cultivation interest risks driving collection pressure — the calculus is different. The 2025 RHS State of Gardening Report, itself a landmark document, found that around one in three cultivated plant types in UK gardens is now at risk in cultivation, and one in six can be considered endangered. It is a sobering reminder that scarcity in the garden and scarcity in the wild often move in the same direction.
Conservation organisations have begun to grapple openly with what might be called the “Streisand Effect” of botanical discovery: the act of drawing attention to a rare plant’s existence or location can accelerate the very threat it was intended to counter. Researchers studying the ghost orchid (Dendrophylax lindenii) — a leafless, ghostly white flower clinging to cypress trunks in the swamps of Florida and Cuba — have taken pains to keep specific population locations secret. The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimated fewer than 1,000 ghost orchids remain in the United States, and proposed the species for listing under the Endangered Species Act in 2025. Poachers, park biologists have observed, are not deterred by heat, alligators, or waist-deep water. They are deterred by not knowing where to look. Publicity removes that protection.
The Last Wild Lady’s Slipper
Nowhere is the tension between celebrity and security more acutely felt than in the case of Britain’s own vanishing orchid. The lady’s slipper orchid, Cypripedium calceolus, was once widespread across the limestone grasslands of northern England. Collecting pressure during the Victorian orchid mania, combined with habitat loss, reduced it to a single surviving wild plant by the latter decades of the 20th century — one flower, in one secret location on the North Yorkshire moors, its precise whereabouts known only to a handful of conservationists. Not even all specialists at Kew Gardens, it is said, have been told where it grows.
The precautions are not mere prudence. In 2004, a thief attempted to pull one of the reintroduced cultivated specimens from the ground. In 2009, a separate plant — located on a golf course in Lancashire — survived what was described only as a “knife attack” by a poacher seeking to take cuttings. In 2010, public officials considered the threat serious enough to grant a reintroduced specimen temporary police protection. These are not abstract risks. They are documented crimes against a flower.
The lady’s slipper is now the subject of an intensive propagation and reintroduction programme, centred at Kew Gardens, which has successfully established plants at up to a dozen sites across Britain. By 2018, the reintroduced population had produced some 700 shoots and 200 blooms — a cautious but real recovery. Yet the new plants, scattered across moorland and limestone pavements, are every bit as vulnerable to theft as their wild ancestor. Metal cages guard against deer. Copper rings deter slugs. And human wardens, sleeping in tents, guard against the most dangerous predator of all.
A Global Criminal Enterprise
What was once the preserve of eccentric Victorian plant hunters has evolved, in the 21st century, into something far more organised and far more destructive.
South Africa’s Succulent Karoo — an arid region roughly the size of Kentucky, extending from southwestern Namibia into the Northern and Western Cape provinces — hosts more than 6,000 succulent plant species, of which some 40 percent are found nowhere else on earth. Since approximately 2019, it has also been the target of what law enforcement officials now describe as an industrial-scale trafficking operation. Criminal networks have dug up millions of plants from this unique landscape, smuggling them to collectors in Europe, the Gulf states, and East Asia, with a particular appetite emanating from markets in South Korea, China, and Japan, where small, unusual succulents have become status objects — the botanical equivalent of a luxury watch.
A report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime describes South Africa as facing an “expanding illicit trade” in rare flora, linking the surge to social media and pandemic-era lockdowns. The analysis is damning in its specificity. Since 2019, authorities have seized over one million illegally harvested succulents, representing more than 650 species, transiting Southern Africa en route to overseas markets. The scale overwhelmed conservation bodies tasked with handling confiscated plants, with botanical gardens across the country receiving confiscated specimens at a rate that sometimes reached tens of thousands per week.
The internet, in the view of botanist Carly Cowell at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has blown the market wide open. She uses the example of a small-scale vendor who previously sold a single plant to an occasional tourist, and who can now sell multiple specimens daily to buyers around the world, dispatching them by post. The logical endpoint of this democratisation of access is not more people enjoying rare plants — it is the functional extinction of the species concerned. Millions of plants have been illegally dug from the Succulent Karoo, resulting in the functional extinction of at least eight species, with hundreds more being pushed toward the same fate.
The situation has been compounded by the corruption of the very enforcement structures meant to protect the plants. Karel Du Toit, the police officer who led one of the most successful anti-poaching units in the Northern Cape, was arrested in May 2024 and his unit subsequently redirected, leaving a significant gap in enforcement. Meanwhile, a reformed former gang member from Cape Town, speaking to journalists, described how traffickers deliberately exploit the ignorance of border officials: “Rare plants are easier to smuggle because, frankly speaking, very few police or border officers know whether a rose-petalled flower is endangered and illegal to export.”
The Social Media Effect
Understanding how a succulent the size of a golf ball ends up fetching hundreds of euros on the European collector market requires understanding the ecosystem through which desire for rare plants is now cultivated and sustained. The answer, increasingly, is Instagram, TikTok, and an archipelago of specialist online forums and marketplaces where rare plants change hands in conditions that range from the perfectly legal to the deeply criminal — and where the line between the two can be extraordinarily difficult for buyers to discern.
The pandemic years supercharged this dynamic globally. Confined at home, people turned to plants — for company, for purpose, for something living to tend — and the houseplant market exploded in ways that sent ripples all the way to remote mountain slopes and desert scrublands. When a particular succulent or orchid appeared in a post that gathered millions of views, demand spiked immediately. Suppliers, unable to meet that demand through legitimate nursery cultivation, turned to wild collection. The mechanism was not new — the Victorian orchid craze operated on similar principles — but the speed and scale of propagation through social media had no historical precedent.
Cowell describes the online plant trade as existing in a vast grey zone. AI technology used to monitor spaces where plants are bought and sold online quickly revealed how much of the trade exists in the grey area between legal and illegal, and how difficult it is to parse the difference. A succulent sold on a specialist platform may have been nursery-grown or wild-collected; the buyer often cannot tell, and the seller may not be legally obliged to disclose. The result is a market in which ethical and criminal purchasing coexist largely invisibly, and in which the act of buying a rare plant online carries the same potential for unintended harm as buying a piece of ivory jewellery without verifying its provenance.
The Question the RHS Must Answer
This is the context in which the Royal Horticultural Society’s promotional and educational work must now operate. The RHS Chelsea Flower Show, which generates global media coverage every May and is attended by hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, has an unparalleled ability to introduce plants to mainstream consciousness. When a rare species appears in a winning exhibit, the following morning it becomes a trending search term. When the RHS Plant of the Year is announced, nurseries selling the winning cultivar may be overwhelmed with enquiries within hours.
For cultivated varieties developed by breeders — the kind of plants that predominate in Chelsea’s Great Pavilion — this commercial attention is entirely benign, even desirable. But for species that straddle the boundary between cultivation and the wild, or whose horticultural availability is limited enough that demand could spill over into collection pressure, the equation is more complex.
There is a powerful argument that the only long-term protection for a threatened plant species is to make it sufficiently available in cultivation that wild specimens lose their black market value. If a slipper orchid can be bought legally, propagated, and grown on a windowsill for £50, the incentive to pay £5,000 for a wild-collected specimen narrows considerably. This is the logic that has driven propagation programmes at Kew and elsewhere — flood the legitimate market so thoroughly that the criminal market becomes commercially unviable.
But that process takes time, expertise, and infrastructure. In the interim period — between a species’ initial discovery or publicity spike and its widespread availability through legitimate nurseries — the danger window is wide open. It is precisely in this window that the newly described Paphiopedilum canhii was essentially stripped from the wild. It is in this window that the Wollemi pine, a tree thought extinct for 65 million years until its discovery in a hidden canyon in Australia in 1994, required extraordinary secrecy measures to protect its remaining wild grove — a secrecy so rigorous that the canyon’s location remains classified to this day.
A Brick Wall at Risk of Collapse
Cowell, in her most memorable formulation of the problem, urges people to think about biodiversity as a brick wall. Remove one brick and the structure holds; remove enough, and the wall collapses. The loss of a species of conophytum — a tiny, stone-like succulent that most people would struggle to identify if they walked past it — may seem trivial in isolation. Compound it with the loss of eight other species from the same ecosystem, add the disruption to the pollinators that depended on those plants and the seed dispersal networks they sustained, and the cumulative effect becomes another chapter in what scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction.
The RHS’s own 2025 State of Gardening Report found that UK gardens contain over 308,000 cultivated plant types — far exceeding the diversity of food or medicinal crops — yet noted that around one in three cultivated plants assessed is at risk in cultivation, and one in six are endangered. The report framed gardens and gardeners as the custodians of a biodiversity that extends well beyond the conservation sector. That custodian role, however, presupposes a market in which demand for plants is met through legitimate, sustainable cultivation — not through pillaging the last wild populations of species that took millions of years to evolve.
The RHS has shown awareness of this tension. Its science and conservation work increasingly emphasises biosecurity, sustainable sourcing, and the need for provenance transparency in the plant trade. But the institution’s greatest asset — its ability to reach and inspire millions of gardeners — is also its greatest risk. Enthusiasm, without information, can be destructive.
The Warden in the Field
The lone warden on the North Yorkshire moors does not think in abstractions about institutions and incentives and market dynamics. He thinks about the single flower he has been sent to protect, its crimson-and-yellow petals vulnerable to wind, frost, and the footsteps of anyone who might find their way across the moorland in the small hours.
He knows, better than most, that the beauty of a rare flower and the threat it faces are not separate things. They are the same thing, expressed from different angles. The rarity is what makes the beauty precious. The beauty is what makes the rarity dangerous.
That is the oldest paradox in the world of rare plants — and it has no comfortable resolution. The answer is not to stop celebrating rare flowers, nor to cease the vital work of drawing public attention to threatened species. But it does require an ongoing, clear-eyed reckoning with the ways in which fame and vulnerability are, for a living organism, the same coin flipped.
Somewhere on a moor in England, a man sleeps lightly, listening for footsteps. Somewhere in a canyon in Australia, a grove of trees that once shaded dinosaurs grows in a location known to fewer people than know the codes of nuclear missiles. Somewhere on a mountain in Borneo, one of fewer than fifty surviving orchids unfurls its extraordinary petals in spring — and somewhere, someone who knows exactly what that orchid is worth is deciding whether the journey is worth the risk.
The answer to that last question depends entirely on whether the world can make knowing about a rare plant feel more valuable than possessing it.