Bought a potted plant and it died within days? Exposing the flower market scams

Those of us who love flowers often run into this: we buy plants at the market and they die within days of getting them home. Is it really because we don't know how to care for them? There's something fishy going on. Some concerned journalist friends went undercover in the flower market to see what these flower vendors are actually up to.

Plants are hard to keep alive because the vendors have tampered with them before you even bring them home.

Trick one: Leaf shine makes flowers look vibrant

To make potted plants look good for sale, many vendors use a chemical agent called "leaf shine." When a buyer comes around, the vendor sprays it on, and the flowers look especially vibrant. If they don't sell, they wash the chemical off with water.

Trick two: Nutrients speed up the plant's death

When buyers worry that small potted plants and flowers won't survive, vendors kindly recommend some "nutrients" and instruct them to use them frequently. But in reality, these so-called nutrients are "plant growth regulators," similar to compound fertilizer. Using too many nutrients actually speeds up the plant's withering and death.

Trick three: Stylish pots lined with plastic

In the flower market, to save costs, vendors put most plants in simple plastic pots, and some just wrap the roots in a layer of plastic bags. Once, a customer ordered several areca palms (Dypsis lutescens) about 1 m tall. The reporter was about to fill the pots with soil when the boss stopped him."

Trick four: Artificial "dismemberment" to create fake bonsai

After several days of getting along, the reporter finally won the flower shop owner's trust and built friendships with the other apprentices, learning more insider secrets along the way. Normally, valuable bonsai require years of cultivation and pruning to take shape, but today's bonsai involve many tricks. They are basically rootless bonsai forcibly twisted and carved by hand, and can take shape in half a year to 1 year.

Trick five: Injecting pigment turns local flowers into foreign goods

What amazed the reporter most was that with a single injection of pigment, an ordinary cactus (Echinopsis) would turn from green to yellow, red, orange... Just like that, an ordinary cactus became a valuable plant from Malaysia, and the price went from 5 yuan for three to 30 yuan each.