Toronto woman opens online business in Detroit selling the world's rarest plants

Jocelyn Ho is known as The Rare Plant Fairy and she's making a name for herself by selling some of the rarest plants in the world. (Source: The Rare Plant Fairy)

You don’t have to travel far to get your hands on some of the world’s most exotic house plants.

In fact, you don’t have to travel at all thanks to The Rare Plant Fairy, an e-commerce company created by a Hong Kong-Canadian who’s set up a nursery in Detroit.

Originally from Toronto, Jocelyn Ho is the driving force behind the business, which started as a passion project born out of the COVID-19 pandemic and the public health restrictions that came with it.

READ MORE: 'Plant boom:' Working from home, pandemic stress has people turning green

“I was collecting a lot of plants,” Ho told CTV News Toronto in an interview. “They were falling off of my window sill… And so my husband was like, ‘You need to get rid of some of these.’”

So that weekend, Ho said she sold $1,000 worth of her exotic plants and used that money to build her business.

After spending about a year working out of her and her husband’s spare bedroom in Detroit, Ho said that in order to keep up with demand -- and to keep some of the apartment uninhabited by plants -- the business needed to expand.

Over the next two years, Ho would set up shop in a 2,000-square-foot commercial retail space before The Rare Plant Fairy eventually moved to a 5,000-square-foot space inside of an old truck factory.

And the business has been thriving ever since as Canadians continue to work from home and seek to be surrounded by big leafy houseplants, cacti, and everything in between.

True to her business’s name, the products you’ll find online on Ho’s website are rare and range in price from a USD$45 Rhaphidophora Hongkongensis to an eye-watering USD$16,000 Philodendron Billietiae Variegated.

Some of Jocelyn Ho's rare plants are seen in her Detroit showroom. (Source: The Rare Plant Fairy)

“There are plants that can command that price because of the rarity. They can be rare by demand, like supply and demand and there’s just no supply to fulfill the demand. Or, they’re just really difficult to propagate,” Ho explained.

As for sourcing the plants, Ho said she started the business by buying and trading plants from other collectors -- a practice she had experience in by way of the lucrative sneaker market.

From there, exotic items could be imported from South America, Florida, Thailand, and Indonesia to keep her curated collection fully stocked.

• Download our app to get local alerts to your device
• Get the latest local updates right to your inbox

“Now, we have a lot of mother stocks where we grow mostly on our own. So a lot of our plants are propagated from cuttings, made from our mother plants, and some are grown from seeds that we actually make here,” Ho said.

In her short time serving the niche market that is exotic houseplants, Ho has established herself as a force to be reckoned with and is among only 14 vendors in the world to be invited to the 45th upcoming International Aroid Society Show and Sale.

“We're very happy to be invited again for the second time,” Ho said of the two-day event, which takes place on Sept. 24 and 25 in Miami.

When she’s not caught up in the buying and selling of rare plants, Ho is never far from her collection and says she finds herself at the nursery even on her “off days.”

“I come in and kind of just relax and just tend to the plants and those days I find really relaxing when I'm here alone. Just working on the plants. It's really nice.” 

Jocelyn Ho's rare plants are seen in her Detroit showroom. (Source: The Rare Plant Fairy)