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Julia Child Rose
The Julia Child Rose was patented in 2004 and is well-known for its buttery, yellow petals and glossy appearance, as perfect as a fake flower. The plant resists disease and doesn’t give its owners much trouble while thriving in most temperatures, making it as popular in Florida as in California.
Buying a Julia Child Rose costs about $90, making it the first easy entry in this list of quickly ascending flower values.
Hydrangea
Hydrangeas are not rare. They also don’t have a set price or color, ranging in value and variety from a few dollars for a bunch to hundreds of dollars for a small cluster of them. The reason they are on this list is that the cultural value of hydrangeas has driven their value past the point of rarity making a difference.
These flowers are the most popularly used flowers for bouquets and wedding arrangements. As such, high-quality hydrangeas fetch handsome premiums at receptions and celebrations across the world. An expensive wedding bouquet can cost $500, even if the hydrangeas themselves are not the world’s rarest flower.
Saffron Crocus
High-quality saffron is well-known as one of the world’s most expensive spices, so it stands to reason that a flowering Saffron Crocus would be one of the most expensive flowers too. These purple flowers bloom in the Fall and give off a scent of spicy vanilla.
The plant begins as a “corm,” which is a saffron bulb, and grows into a beautiful flower whose stigmas can be harvested and used in cooking as the coveted spice, saffron. These yellow or orange strands, of which each flower contains around three, are the reason this hardy plant, which can survive temperatures down to negative ten degrees Fahrenheit, can cost over $800 to buy.
Gold of Kinabalu Orchid
The Gold of Kinabalu orchid, also known as Rothschild’s Slipper Orchid, is a tall plant that grows up to six flowers in a single stalk. But this doesn’t stop this ultra-rare orchid, which flowers around late April to early May, from costing around $5,500 to own.
The orchid grows in the mountains of the rainforests of Malaysia and Borneo, specifically in the vicinity of Mount Kinabalu, hence the flower’s name. Its red-spotted petals attract parasitic flies, which pollinate the orchid. However, artificial cultivation has failed to reproduce its specific growing needs anywhere else, which keeps the foreign beauty in high rarity and higher demand.
17th-Century Semper Augustus
tulips known as the Semper Augustus represent one of the most expensive flowers ever sold, if we’re talking about 1634-1637 in Holland.
In what would later become known as Tulip Mania, the introduction of tulips to Europe at the time prompted royal interest because of the flower’s unique shape, turning it into a symbol of status and wealth. Holland and the Netherlands, which at the time represented the most advanced economic system in the world, began to pay through the nose for tulips, especially the rarer multicolored ones. A tulip virus (yes, really) broke out in the later 1630s and caused the price of the remaining tulips to skyrocket and crash, causing a run on the tulip market and a drop in value so harsh that it caused economic panic.
We can only estimate the value of a single tulip bulb as being in the thousands, even back then.
Hochstetter’s Butterfly Orchid
Continuing the orchid’s dominance of this rare flower show, the Hochstetter’s Butterfly Orchid was rediscovered in the mid-2010s on an island in the Azores in the North Atlantic Ocean, called São Jorge. Long thought extinct, the butterfly orchid, as this flowering pattern is called, only grows in a single forest on the top of a mountain on this island.
The orchid’s scarcity is caused by invasive flower species introduced to the islands by settlers. To buy one of these exquisitely rare flowers costs around $6,000 per stalk.
Shenzhen Nongke Orchid
Orchids have dominated this list so far, but they won’t take the top spot. The most expensive orchid in the world is known as the Shenzhen Nongke Orchid, named after the agricultural scientists who made it at Shenzhen Nongke University in China. You read that right – this orchid is man-made, a process that required extensive, delicate research for almost a decade.
This orchid is exquisitely rare. Even the plants that do exist only bloom once every 4 or 5 years. An anonymous bidder bought a Shenzhen Nongke Orchid in 2005 for $217,000 (or at least, the Chinese Yuan equivalent). This makes it the most expensive flower ever sold at an auction.
The Kadupul Flower
This flower is so rare that it’s become priceless. This is because of a combination of two unfortunate facts of nature – the national flower of Sri Lanka can only be grown there, and as soon as you pick it, it dies.
Even if you don’t pick it, the flowers die in a matter of hours. This means that so far, no one has been able to preserve the Kadupul flower long enough to send it anywhere. The only way to experience this white beauty, even secondhand, is to buy exorbitantly priced Kadupul flower perfume, which takes on some of the flower’s legendary relaxing properties.
Gloriosa
Also known as a flame lily, fire lily, and glory lily, the gloriosa thrives in hot conditions in tropical Africa and Asia. It's not a true lily—rather, it's a member of the autumn-crocus family—and it's certainly not priced similarly to the lilies you'll find at the grocery store.The gloriosa lily is extremely beautiful, its long stamens surrounded by red-orange reflexed tepals, but the likely reason it's so expensive (up to $10 a stem) is because it's rare to find and difficult to harvest. It's also very poisonous.
Arum Lily
Like the gloriosa, the arum lily (Arum maculatum)—which often gets confused with the calla lily (Zantedeschia aethiopica)—is not a true lily. It's related to the more leafy caladium and philodendron. They're known to be expensive because they're extraordinarily strong, impossibly tall, and produce abundant flowers. The unusual white, hood-shaped flowers are such a status symbol they were featured in Prince Edward's 1999 wedding.Gardenia
the gardenia is pretty common; it's not clear whether its luxurious reputation stems (get it?) from the fact that it's become a popular wedding flower or simply because it's so darn pretty and wonderful-smelling. In fact, it serves as the inspiration for a multitude of designer fragrances. Another reason it's so pricey: You can't buy gardenias by the stem. They must be purchased by the plant, so you at least get more bang for your buck.-rarest.org/treehugger.com
sana may magbili sa akin nyan someday haha joke lang
