Community Guidelines

Tend slowly. Share plants you love, help people learn, and treat the person on the other end like a fellow collector — because they are. Disagreement about care methods or taxonomy is welcome; contempt is not.

• Keep it plants. SlowStem is a plant community — posts and listings should be about plants and collecting.
• No harassment, hate, threats, or personal attacks. No posting anyone’s private information.
• No spam or self-promotion loopholes. The one-post-a-week limit is the point — don’t try to route around it with extra accounts or comment-section broadcasting.
• Post your own photos and words, or content you have permission to share.

• No fraud, scams, phishing, or impersonating another person, seller, or SlowStem itself.
• No selling stolen goods, using counterfeit documents, or inventing false provenance for a plant.
• No threats, glorification of violence, or credible safety risks to anyone. No sexual content or sexual solicitation.
• No malware, malicious links, or attempts to compromise other members or the site.
• No asking to move payment to gift cards, cryptocurrency, wire transfer, or “friends and family” payments to dodge SlowStem’s checkout and protections.
• No ban evasion, no coordinated or retaliatory reporting, and no manipulating seller ratings.

• Identify honestly.Label species and cultivars as accurately as you can, and say so when you’re unsure. Deliberate mislabeling (passing a common plant off as a rare one) is a serious violation.
• No poached plants. Wild-collected material has no home here. Sell and share nursery-propagated plants.
• Follow plant law.No trade in CITES- or ESA-restricted species without documentation, no shipping plants where they’re prohibited or invasive, and no international shipping without the required permits and phytosanitary certificates. Details in the Terms, §8.
• Disclose problems. Pests, rot history, recent imports still acclimating — say so up front.

• Photograph the actual plant being sold, recently, and show its flaws as well as its best leaf.
• Honor your prices and your accepted offers — offers are binding on both sides.
• Ship on time, pack like the plant’s life depends on it, add tracking.
• Complete on-platform deals on-platform. Taking a deal you found here off-platform to dodge fees breaks trust (and the Terms).

• Only review transactions you actually completed. No reviews from people who didn’t buy or sell.
• No fake, paid, traded, or incentivized reviews, and no writing reviews for your own listings through another account.
• No coordinating reviews to inflate or tank a seller, and no threatening a bad review to pressure someone.
• Rate honestly — reviews are how the community protects itself.

The marketplace is for live plants, cuttings, corms, tubers, seeds where legally permitted, and nonregulated plant-care accessories we approve (pots, mounts, supports). Not allowed:

• Pesticides, fungicides, and other regulated chemicals.
• Cannabis and other controlled, psychoactive, or prohibited plants.
• Animals and animal products; wildlife.
• Protected plant material sold without the required authorization, and anything covered by the plant-law rules above.
• Hazardous materials, counterfeit goods, and anything needing a professional license we haven’t verified.

If you see something that breaks these guidelines, use the report button on the post, listing, or profile. We review reports and may use automated systems to help prioritize them. Depending on severity, we may remove content, issue a warning, restrict marketplace access, or close an account. Deliberate scams, poaching, and harassment usually mean immediate removal.