Buying the wrong "New Year's Eve flower" may be illegal! Pay attention to these two points when distinguishing →

The Spring Festival is approaching, and New Year flowers are naturally the most popular category in flower markets everywhere. Whether they are potted plants or cut flowers, they are almost all products of large-scale artificial production, but occasionally there will be some flowers collected from the wild mixed in, the most typical of which is the Xing'an rhododendron.

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Merchants generally call it "dried branch plum". If you go to its hometown in Northeast China, people will call it "Dazixiang". The original name should be "Tartar incense", because the ancient Manchu people liked to burn its branches and leaves as incense, but this name is too impolite, so it has now been changed to "Dazixiang".

Photographed by the author

The winter in Northeast China is long and cold, and the annual growth period of the Rhododendron dasyphyllum is very short. Generally, it ends dormancy in April and starts to grow, blooms in late April and early May, and then shoots out new branches. In July and August, it begins to breed new flower buds. After September, it begins to "hibernate", waiting for the next spring to bloom again. If you cut off the branches of the Rhododendron dasyphyllum in winter and put them in a warm room and soak them in water, they will bloom early, which looks like "dead wood coming back to life in spring", which is why it can be ranked among the New Year flowers.

If I could go back a few years to write this article, I would definitely tell you: Don't buy Dahurian rhododendron, because almost all the Dahurian rhododendrons on the market at that time were collected from the wild. It doesn't really matter if you only pick newer branches, as it still has a strong ability to recover, but collectors often cut it from close to the ground, which is almost equivalent to exhausting the pond to catch all the fish. It will take several years for the Dahurian rhododendron that has been cut down like this to recover. Dahurian rhododendron is an important component species of the local coniferous forest community. If it is over-cut in this way, it will have a serious impact on the stability of the ecosystem in the future. Therefore, in the new version of the "National Key Protected Wild Plant List" promulgated in 2021, the wild Dahurian rhododendron is listed as a second-level protection, and cutting and selling it are both illegal.

However, artificially cultivated individuals are not included in this list and can be legally sold. In fact, many research institutions are committed to the tissue culture research of Dahurian rhododendron. The so-called tissue culture is actually cloning, using a little bit of plant tissue cells to obtain a complete new individual. According to news media reports, in 2017, a company in Heilongjiang began to explore the commercial production of Dahurian rhododendron. By 2023, there will be mature flowering plants available for the market.

However, the law-abiding people may still have doubts. The Xing'an azaleas sold on the market all look the same. If there are illegal wild branches, how can they be distinguished? There is indeed no very accurate method to judge, but there are two points to make a rough judgment.

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1. Observe the branch morphology

As mentioned above, the branches of Rhododendron dasyphylla only grow for three or four months each year. When they sprout again after winter dormancy, the growth direction of the branches will deviate, so its branches look crooked. Counting the number of turns can tell how many years it has grown. Its tissue culture production has only been going on for a few years, so the number of "turns" in the tissue culture branches on the market will not be too many, and because the artificial planting environment is stable and the nutrition is sufficient, the length of each "turn" will be long and uniform, up to tens of centimeters. Branches with many "turns" of varying lengths and only a few centimeters can basically be judged as wild.

2. Pay attention to price

In addition, artificial cultivation of flowers requires a lot of production costs. Take the common shrub cut flowers as an example. The retail price of roses and wintersweets is about 2 yuan at the lowest, and these are plants that can be harvested in one year. If the plant, Xing'an azalea, which takes several years to bloom, is really cultivated artificially, the price will definitely not be too low. The cheap branches on the market are probably collected from the wild. With the expansion of production scale and technological updates, I believe that there will be more and more Xing'an azaleas cultivated artificially in the future.

This article is a work of Science Popularization China-Starry Sky Project

Produced by: Science Popularization Department of China Association for Science and Technology

Producer｜China Science and Technology Press Co., Ltd., Beijing Zhongke Xinghe Culture Media Co., Ltd.

Author: Desert Porcupine Science Writer

Review丨Gu Yourong Associate Professor, School of Life Sciences, Capital Normal University