You might be harbouring an illegal house plant
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Loading... - Dylan Reid
- 04 Jan 2022
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From your Pilea peperomioides to your Philodendron pedatum, a range of highly sought-after house plants have been targeted by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) in recent years. The former, for example, otherwise known as the UFO plant or the Chinese money plant, saw a surge in online popularity around 2017. When MPI caught wind of it and found no legal record of the plant’s existence in New Zealand, it was deemed a “new organism” and quickly proceeded to crack down on sellers and growers harvesting the plant.
But the list of “illegal” house plants doesn’t stop there. In an application filed to the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) by MPI last year, the Philodendron schottii, the Philodendron squamiferum, and the Alocasia clypeolata (also referred to as the Alocasia “green shield”) were also found to be “new organisms”.
The reason for this is because of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 (HSNO) which saw the EPA tasked with drawing up a list of all plants present in New Zealand before 1998. Any plant not on the list – with no evidence to support its historic existence – would likely then be considered a “new organism” making it “illegal to own, import, propagate or trade”, according to Peter Thomson, MPI’s director of animal and plant health.
“There’s an enormous number of plant species and their cultivars in existence, even in New Zealand. Records are incomplete, so no one can reasonably know every plant species that collectors hold here. It’s only when trade in the more popular ones becomes apparent that MPI can look into their presence in New Zealand,” says Thomson.
According to Kathryn Hurr, biosecurity and technical manager at the industry group New Zealand Plant Producers (NZPPI), the HSNO Act was “never a comprehensive list of plants in New Zealand in 1998 … but a comprehensive list would’ve also been impossible to do”. She says in the last few years, the HSNO Act has struggled to keep up against the exploding popularity of indoor house plants, driven in large part by social media – something that didn’t exist when the legislation was first drawn up. As a result, there are now more varieties than ever on the market, leaving many species stuck in a sort of “grey zone” or “no man’s land”, particularly when they’re found to cause little harm but have no evidence to prove they were around prior to 1998.
Anecdotal evidence for the Pilea peperomioides, for example, suggests they’ve been in New Zealand for the last 30 or so years. But with no conclusive evidence to support this, MPI cracked down on them until a risk assessment found they were unlikely to be invasive to the environment. Since then, it’s taken a more pragmatic approach, recognising that because they’re so widespread among house plant enthusiasts, eradicating them completely would be an impossible task. Read More...
