What Strange Horticulture Teaches About Spotting Fake Plants

I bought a faux monstera two years ago that looked perfect on the product page and wrong the moment it came out of the box. It took me an embarrassingly long time to say why. The leaves were the right green, the stems were sturdy, the pot was fine. Every visitor's eyes still slid over it the way they slide over a shop display.

What finally gave me the words was a video game. Strange Horticulture, released in 2022 by the small studio Bad Viking, puts you behind the counter of a plant shop in a misty town called Undermere. Customers come in asking for a specific plant, and to find it you have to identify unlabelled specimens on your shelves using an old field guide: leaf shape, edges, veins, how the leaves sit on the stem, sometimes a smell or a colour on the underside. It is a cosy puzzle game. It is also, without meaning to be, a training course in exactly the details that make or break a faux plant.

Why the eye catches a fake before you can explain it

We do not look at plants one leaf at a time. We take in the overall habit: the size of the leaves relative to the plant, the angle they hold, how regular or irregular they are. A real plant carries a history in that habit. Young leaves differ from old ones, lower leaves sag a little, some edges are torn. Most faux plants are built from a handful of moulded leaf shapes repeated over and over, assembled at the same angle, which is precisely the regularity our eyes register as artificial.

Strange Horticulture works because it forces you to stop seeing the whole and to check features in order. After a few hours of play I found myself doing the same thing to the plants in my flat, and the faux ones that had always bothered me suddenly had specific, fixable faults.

Five real plants, and what fakes usually get wrong

These are the species I own or have tested as faux versions, with the detail the game's method made me notice.

Monstera deliciosa

A real monstera grows its famous splits and holes only as it matures. Young plants, and the lower leaves on older ones, are heart-shaped and mostly solid. My bad monstera was about 60 cm tall with every single leaf fully split and the size of a dinner plate. A real plant that small would carry smaller, plainer leaves at the base. The convincing faux versions mix two or three leaf sizes and include at least one unsplit leaf.

Fiddle-leaf fig

The real leaves are shaped like a violin body, wider near the tip than the base, with a wavy edge and pale veins that stand out clearly. They spiral up the trunk rather than sitting in neat pairs. Cheap faux figs tend to have flat, symmetrical oval leaves with faint printed veins, and they look like rubber plants from across a room.

Olive tree

Real olive leaves are grey-green on top and distinctly silvery underneath, and the breeze from an open window flashes that silver. A faux olive that is the same colour on both sides is the single most common giveaway I see on a balcony. Turn a leaf over in the shop before you buy.

Bird of paradise

The large leaves of Strelitzia split naturally along their side veins as they age, especially in moving air. Perfect, unbroken paddle leaves read as plastic. A few manufacturers now mould in the splits, and those are worth the extra money.

Snake plant

Real leaves emerge from the soil at different heights and slightly different angles, and the banding pattern differs leaf to leaf. Faux versions often come as a tidy fan of identical blades cut to the same height. You can fix this one at home by pulling a few leaves up or pushing them down in the foam.

The advice I disagree with: "buy the most expensive one"

The usual answer to "how do I avoid a fake looking faux plant" is to spend more, and price does correlate with leaf quality to a point. My two most convincing faux plants, though, cost about 40 and 55 euros. My worst one cost 140. The expensive monstera had beautiful material and the wrong habit. Money buys a better surface; it does not buy botanical accuracy, because that depends on whether the designer looked closely at a real plant.

So I now check structure first and material second. If the structure is right, a mid-price plant will pass in a living room. If the structure is wrong, a premium finish only makes the mistake more expensive. Our guide to what makes a faux leaf look real covers the surface side, and how to spot a cheap faux plant covers construction.

A shop-floor routine borrowed from the game

When I am in a shop now, or scrolling through product photos, I run through the same order the game's field guide uses:

1. Name the species. If the listing just says "tropical plant" or "green leaf plant," the designer may not have worked from a real one.
2. Compare leaf sizes. Real plants carry younger and older leaves. Count how many distinct leaf sizes you can see; fewer than two is a warning.
3. Check the edges and veins against a photo of the real species on your phone.
4. Look at how leaves attach to the stem: alternate, opposite, spiral or from a base.
5. Turn a leaf over. Undersides are where cheap plants save money, and where species like olive and some calatheas show their real colour.

This takes about two minutes per plant. It has stopped me from buying three plants this year that I would have regretted, and it is the same routine I added to the checks in telling if an artificial plant will last.

If you want something to do this week, pick the faux plant in your home that bothers you most and find a clear photo of the real species. Put them side by side and go through the five points above. Most of the time you will find one fault you can correct by hand, usually leaf height or angle, and fixing that one thing does more than any amount of dusting. And if you want to train your eye the enjoyable way, Strange Horticulture is a weekend well spent; the rest of our games coverage has other plant-heavy titles.