The flower market has many tricks, let’s fight against counterfeiting together!

Among all major commodity categories, flowers and plants are actually the hardest hit by counterfeits , and the success rate of deceiving people is particularly high, but it is not well known.

Online shopping scam, common operation

The easiest way to buy fake flowers is online. There are three main tricks used by online stores to sell fake flowers.

One is to create something out of nothing , that is, to use Photoshop technology to modify photos of plants that do not exist in the world to attract customers. The most typical ones are the "colorful lily of the valley", "five-color blueberry", and "exclusive fantasy succulents" that were popular in the past few years. Of course, no one knows what the goods sent are. This routine is actually very easy to see through, because the photos are so fake, and those merchants also steal pictures from each other. If you search for them, they are all the same, at most the resolution is slightly different, as if they are electronic patina.

The colorful lily of the valley that was popular a few years ago is now hard to find. When searching for related flower seedlings, you can even see the platform's prompts丨pinterest

The second type of trick is to mix fakes with real ones. This is not easy to spot. Even if the problem is finally discovered, it is often past the time limit for the e-commerce platform to deal with it. For example, some online stores sell "roses" and "roses", which are actually the most common and cheap rose varieties . These roses were originally used as grafted rootstocks. Many people waited until they were planted and bloomed before they realized they were deceived. Some merchants will also stick the finished cut flowers at the root of the rose, wrap them in plastic wrap, and bury them in the soil, which is very confusing.

What can grow from such a seedling depends on the conscience of the merchant.

As carnivorous plants have become more and more popular over the years, some people have started to use their crooked ideas to impersonate them with seeds of other plants. The packaging of these fake carnivorous plant seeds is very beautiful, but they are completely different when grown. In fact, reliable carnivorous plant merchants mainly sell finished seedlings . If they sell seeds, they are generally limited to species that are easy to sow, such as sundews and glandular hair grass.

The seeds of the Venus flytrap Dionaea muscipula are like small black droplets, have a short lifespan, and are rarely sold directly | Rosťa Kracík / Wikipedia

The third trick is to pass off inferior products as good ones . This is more covert and is mainly used for some specific plants. For example, jasmine can be used as bonsai or cut flowers, and its main use is to smoke jasmine tea. After a jasmine plant has grown for many years, its stems will gradually become woody and are called old piles. The old piles of succulent plants are beautiful and popular, but the old piles of jasmine are different, because the number of flowers will decrease. If you cultivate them carefully, they can be made into bonsai, but if the goal is to see the flowers, the value is often discounted. Flower farmers usually throw them away or burn them as firewood. However, some merchants will pick them up and sell them. When customers buy them, they see that the jasmine is very big and strong, but in the end it can't bloom, and they think there is something wrong with their skills.

The pictures displayed by merchants are always beautiful, but whether you can grow it like this will take time to verify丨Or Taobao

Strawberries are both good-looking and delicious, but they are not easy to grow. They require experienced hands to grow them well. Some online stores are targeting experienced hands. The "seeds" on the strawberry fruit are actually its fruit. Some people buy imported high-quality strawberries, remove the "seeds" and sow them, and then grow seedlings to sell. Generally, only experienced people who understand the varieties will buy them. Most of these strawberries are hybrid varieties. In order to maintain the stability of seedling traits in production, the seedlings are all tissue culture seedlings. The seedlings grown from sowing will have different traits, resulting in the actual product not being the same as the description.

The high-quality strawberry "Amaou" is full of fruits. You can't grow it like this with inferior seedlings丨Yasukouchi Farm

In addition, regular strawberry farms need to purchase new seedlings every year to prevent viruses from causing degeneration of the variety. The old seedlings that are eliminated and the runner seedlings that grow out, although the varieties are all correct, will have lower yields, and these seedlings will also be sold by dishonest merchants.

Strawberry runners can be used for asexual reproduction. It is fine to keep them at home for fun, but selling them is inferior.丨farmfujita

Some people may think that since many online stores are unreliable, why not just buy the goods in person? Seeing is believing. There must be no fakes, right? In fact, there are fakes, and the way they are fake is similar to that of online stores.

In-person scams are more deadly

For example, online stores can retouch photos and cheat, and physical goods can do the same. This routine mainly appears in farmers' markets and village markets, where some stalls will display a bunch of colorful plant pictures and sell plant tubers and bulbs. If someone buys them and finds that the goods are not the same as the pictures after planting, and then goes back to look for them, the stall owner has already closed up and left.

Every winter, I often see people selling very cheap "daffodils" . They look like the real deal, but they won't bloom when you buy them, because they are not daffodils at all, but Lycoris bulbs stuck on bamboo sticks . Of course, Lycoris flowers are also very beautiful, and it's not a big loss if they can bloom when planted in the soil, but they are very sensitive to environmental changes. Once they are dug out, they usually won't bloom that year.

Do the bulbs of Lycoris look similar to the bulbs of daffodils you imagine? | Biswarup Ganguly

The blooming Lycoris is also very beautiful, but can you really grow it to bloom? | Pixabay

In addition to being sold as daffodils, the bulbs of Lycoris are often used to impersonate tulips and hyacinths. In addition, the underground rhizomes of calamus and daylily are often used to make up the numbers. Some people also use oil peonies and herbal peonies to impersonate ornamental peonies, or use Diospyros vaccinioides to impersonate small-leaf red sandalwood.

Paeonia ostii, used for oil extraction, is often used to impersonate the famous peony. Stan Shebs / Wikipedia

The things I just mentioned, although not the same as the pictures, will generally bloom in the end if they are well cared for, but they just don’t look very pretty. However, there are two things on the street stalls that will never bloom no matter what. One is the so-called "desert rose" or "resurrection flower", which looks like a bunch of curled up cypress leaves. The stall owner will say that it will come back to life and bloom if you soak it in water. In fact, it is a type of lycophyte called Selaginella , which is very drought-resistant. After curling up due to lack of water, it can indeed revive when it encounters water, but it relies on spores to reproduce, so there is no flower to bloom, and you can only look at the leaves.

You must have seen this wrinkled "desert rose" in temples, but if you soak it until it goes bad, it won't bloom into the colorful flowers displayed by the vendors丨Fangtianxia

The dried Selaginella will turn green again when exposed to water, but will it bloom? Impossible | Pxhere

The horticultural varieties of Selaginella tamariscina are actually quite beautiful, but don't use them to deceive people丨KENPEI / Wikipedia

The other thing is even more outrageous. It is a piece of wood-like thing, inserted upright in a flowerpot, giving off a strong scent of perfume. The stall owner will say it is sandalwood, but in fact it is the breathing root of bald cypress. After it is cut down and sprayed with perfume, it no longer has any vitality and will not grow if left there.

Have you ever bought the stimulating "sandalwood"?

Baldcypress's breathing roots | Derek Ramsey; Desert porcupine

There are many fake flowers in street stalls, so will the professional flower market be better? It is true that the situation will be much better, but there are also people who use plant growth regulators to set traps for people.

In the past few years, succulents were very popular and almost became an investment product. Among succulents, there is a term called "brocade", which means a variant individual with light-colored stripes or patches on the leaves. Generally speaking, succulents of the same species with brocade are more expensive than those without brocade. So some people use herbicides and other drugs to destroy the chlorophyll of ordinary succulents and artificially make "brocade" , and the color change looks particularly abrupt. Such succulents are called "medicinal brocade". The vitality itself is weaker than that of normal plants. Even if they are barely kept alive, they will turn green again when the effect of the drug wears off.

The medicinal brocade is more abrupt than the natural brocade and is relatively easy to identify丨Taobao

The natural brocade has clearer edges and the brocaded parts also have regular patterns丨てとパパ/ greensnap

Another flower that is often sprayed with pesticides is the pitcher plant. In the market, you often see the large potted pitcher plant, which is a hybrid Nepenthes × ventrata, generally called flower market red pitcher plant or red bottle pitcher plant in Chinese. Almost all the finished flower market red pitcher plants have been sprayed with growth regulators to make the leaves and bottles grow rapidly. After you buy them home, the bottles will dry up easily. In fact, such pitchers can continue to be raised. As long as the humidity is maintained properly and it is given some time to adapt, new bottles will grow.

By the way, not only can pitcher plants not kill mosquitoes, but they may also attract mosquitoes because of the accumulated water in the bottle丨Pixabay

After all this talk, how can we avoid being cheated when buying flowers? In fact, not only flowers, but all scams in the world rely on information asymmetry to succeed. If you want to avoid being cheated, the best way is to learn more. If you know more than your boss, then he will naturally not be able to cheat you.

Author: Desert Porcupine

This article comes from GuokrNature (ID: GuokrNature)

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