This year’s Flona Festival, organized by the Jakarta Park and Forest Agency, is attended by more than a hundred plant nurseries and pet shops, with some hailing from outside the city. While ornamental house plants make up the majority of the products on display, there is plenty more here than just aglaonemas, orchids and bonsais.

If you are looking to give the farm-to-table life a go, one of the booths here specializes in varieties of thyme, oregano and other herbs a well-stocked kitchen might need. Others, like that of the Jakarta Grape Community, focus more on fruits and other edible vegetation.

For the budding plantsmen and women, there are also several succulents and cacti booths to get you started. Known for being relatively low maintenance, these fleshy and thorny plants are a favorite among newer enthusiasts that caught the plant bug over the pandemic.

Rahman, who has been working with the Lembang-based succulent-nursery Cactus Family since 2018, witnessed firsthand this skyrocketing demand.

“In the early days of the pandemic, we from the cactus and succulent industry had never seen that kind of demand since 1992 [when Cactus Family started operating],” explained Rahman at the festival on Tuesday. While they would usually only sell cacti at least over 6 months old, Rahman had to resort to selling younger plants, even as young as weeks old, to satisfy demand. 

Even now that people are heading back to their offices and schools, the succulent nursery is still selling around 35,000 plants on a monthly basis, lower than their peak pandemic numbers but still considerably higher than the 20,000 sales peak they reached before the pandemic.

Aside from being relatively low maintenance, Rahman also cited the lower price as a reason for the popularity of succulents and cactuses among new plant owners. While some of the younger cacti can be had for as low as Rp 10,000 (US$0.67), older and more exotic varieties can fetch a much higher price, with a 10-year-old golden-barrel cactus capable of crossing the Rp 10 million-mark.

One of the recent succulent converts is Maureen, a 20-year-old university student who got swept up in the plant craze over the pandemic.

“Because of the pandemic, I didn’t have much to do, so I tried looking up gardening and plants that are easy to care for so that I could have something to do,” explained Maureen. Being a university student, she is not interested in the expensive but hard-to-care-for ornamental plants.

Among the plants she has amassed in her collection so far are bougainvilleas, pseudosasa japonica or Japanese bamboos, and as of Tuesday, a golden-barrel cactus. She has also had some luck growing papaya and sugar-apple fruits, here known as srikaya, bounties of which she shared with her neighbors.

But, with more responsibilities taking up her time and fulltime offline classes waiting for her next semester, she admitted that she has had to take a step back from gardening. Still, she only had good things to say about the Flona Festival.

“The variety of plants is quite diverse [...] and I got to chat with the nurseries on how best to take care of the plants,” added Maureen.

This sentiment is shared by Ginting, a 63-year-old retiree from Bintaro and another inductee of the pandemic plant craze. “I saw a video about this festival on YouTube and I came straight here with a couple of my friends,” said Ginting.

Over the course of two years, she has spent at least Rp 10 million on building a little slice of greenery in her small backyard, which includes several hanging orchids and anthuriums.

As she is wary of purchasing plants online, Ginting is appreciative of the government’s initiative on holding the festival. The venue of choice being the Lapangan Banteng Park gave her an excuse to turn the visit into an outing with her friends.

While the plant and pet markets are the main highlights, the Jakarta Park and Forest Agency also hosts several exhibits showcasing each of the province’s five municipalities and Thousand Islands regency. The West Jakarta municipality, for example, is bringing some of the beauty of Rawa Belong flower market to the Flona Festival, which runs from Aug. 26 to Sept. 26.