How can you tell real orchids from fake ones? These few methods help you identify them easily

In recent years, some unscrupulous flower vendors have stopped at nothing, making and selling fakes to pocket ill-gotten gains, with ever-changing tricks that leave people unable to guard against them. The author now summarizes here personal experiences and the lessons learned by surrounding orchid friends who fell victim in transactions, hoping orchid friends can take warning.

Tiger-stripe seedlings

'Tiger-stripe variegation' is a variety many orchid friends pursue, but fake tiger-stripe seedlings can be seen everywhere on the market (especially wild-collected varieties). Most fake tiger-stripe seedlings are ordinary orchids treated with chemicals for a period of time, producing variegated orchids with 'tiger-stripe' and 'snake-stripe' traits, passed off as variegated plants. They generally sell for several hundred yuan or even over a thousand yuan, and at the low end several tens of yuan. Another faking method is to cover with leaves, branches and other materials so that certain parts of the orchid leaves receive no light, producing tiger stripes. With such orchids, after being grown in sunlight for a few days, the colored spots also return to green.

On 'variegated plants' made by artificial means, traces of human intervention can always be found. For example: the variegated spots appear in the same position on every leaf, and the variegation produced is very rigid. It is only a single growth; the old growths have been cut off or broken off, yet the orchid vendor claims they were eaten by animals, and so on.

The 'variegation' produced by real tiger-stripe seedlings is scattered and well-arranged, very natural, with no rigid, flat-cut traces, and the positions where the 'variegation' appears are not uniform.

Colored flowers

The usual method of making this kind of fake orchid is to dye ordinary plants or fragrance-less petal-type flowers red, yellow or black with pigment. If a poorer pigment is used, the flowers will fade when they meet water; with a better pigment they will not fade when they meet water, and then it is not so easy to distinguish. You can hold the flower up to sunlight and carefully examine whether there is color in the veins of the petals to make a preliminary judgment. In addition, a real colored flower has a ring of white crystal edging, while a fake colored flower will have color dyed onto it.

Grafted seedlings

Using toothpicks to stick real growths and ordinary growths together at the roots, 3 to 5 growths as one plant, when in fact there are only 1 to 2 real growths; wash the orchid's roots a bit and you will discover they have been pieced together.

Calling a deer a horse

Passing off ordinary orchids as famous varieties. For example: passing off wild-collected dwarf ordinary orchids as Cui Gai He (Green Lid Lotus); if the leaves are somewhat similar, they are labeled 'Lü Yun' (Green Cloud), 'Huanqiu Hedin' (World Lotus Tripod), 'Xi Shen Zhi' and so on, to profit from the price difference. Some even use lucky bamboo seedlings or cattail grass to pass off as orchids.

Grafting flowers onto other plants

Gluing the petals or lips of three or four flowers onto ordinary petals with glue, to pass them off as multi-petal or multi-lip; some buy the flowers of famous varieties and glue them onto the flower spikes of orchids with beautiful leaf shapes, passing them off as new varieties or famous varieties. This turns ordinary plants into true lotus, true plum, exotic flowers, plain-heart, etc.; by the time orchid friends buy them and take them home, they will find the flower spikes have no vitality at all.

Passing off fish eyes as pearls

Passing off spring orchids from Hubei and Henan as spring orchids from Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Spring orchids from different origins also have different floral fragrances; generally speaking, most spring orchids from Hubei and Henan are not fragrant, and only the fragrance of spring orchids from Jiangsu and Zhejiang is the king of fragrances.

Putting Zhang's hat on Li's head

Passing off four-season orchids as large spring orchids, or insisting that ordinary orchids are some kind of lotus, plum or narcissus petal. In such cases, the price of the fake orchid often differs greatly from the genuine article; sometimes 4 growths of such an orchid are quoted at only 100 yuan, how could that be?