I have only been working with the programme for a short time and currently there are several plants that immediately turn black when downloaded from the warehouse. See the example below. Who knows how to get these back to colour?
Include a .skp file with the offending plant in it so others can diagnose. Or at least a link to the plant on the 3DWH. The likely reason is that plant has many displayed edges that are showing. These black lines at the edges of each plane or facet remain visible and become especially āblackā when zoomed out as they are all still trying to show at the default edge thickness. There are a few methods to hide the edges, depends on how the plant is made.
It might be because the component has many visible edges/lines = black.
Try thisā¦
Edit the component.
Set the view mode to Wire-frame.
Edit > Select All
In Entity Info set the selected edges to be āhiddenā.
Exit the edit.
Change the View mode to textures and you now see just the faces ?
View > Hidden Geom must be off though !
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This is a great method, just a note that plants are sometimes constructed with nested interior groups or components, many times one component per leaf. In this case it may be necessary to explode everything inside the outer shell, to be able to select all the lines simultaneously. 
As @TIG suggestsā¦
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Be very careful using 3d plants, they can make your model unworkable for little benefit.
It looks it has a lot of edges, you can either smooth them by entering into the group select everything and on the soften smooth edges tray set the angle until you see the edges disappear. By the way a lot of the plants from the 3D warehouse have a lot ID details hence a lot of geometry, which is unnecessary if itās just going to be an asset of your model, with a few plants your file could get laggy because of the weight of the plants, try to get low poly models of non important things for your model. Also if your model gets laggy turn of the profile edges, it helps a lot, if you delete a component, group or a material on your model make sure to purge it since sketchup will keep them, it will increase the size of your file unnecessarily.
This is the 3D model i am using:
It looks like that model has been saved with the style set to Edges off, whereas your model has edges turned on, perhaps even profiles. That will make the edges show up. The quality of 3d warehouse models varies greatly.
Indeed, it looks like it is because of the amount of edges. When I zoom in far, the plant does have colour. Is this fixable in the free version?
@endlessfix posted a free-version video showing how to do it using my suggestion - itās a few posts backā¦
Youāll need to hide the edges of the plant, as you donāt have style control in the free version.
Select all of the edges/faces of an object, right click and choose select : deselect faces, right click again and choose hide.
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