Sunflowers come in various colors, from traditional yellow to varying shades of orange and red. Some sunflowers may have multiple-colored or patterning petals. The rare and unique blue sunflower, a variety of the common sunflower with light blue or lavender petals, symbolizes creativity, tranquility, and spirituality in different contexts. Sunflowers are some of the best types of flowers to have in your garden, with over 70 different varieties available in various sizes and colors.
Sunflowers can be grown in single to double, tall to short, and come in cream to gold, yellow, orange, red, mahogany, and chocolate brown. There are even pink sunflowers, but be wary of blue sunflower seeds for sale. There is a deep, dark red hybrid that some gardeners consider purple, but there are no blue sunflowers in nature.
Midnight Oil Blue Sunflowers are a new hip thing on the internet, and they are a rare and beautiful black hybrid organic sunflower. They are known for their distinct blue hue, which is quite beautiful. Watch as these sunflowers bloom into a mesmerizing display of vibrant blue and traditional yellow hues.
📹 Can You Grow Blue Sunflowers? Midnight Blue Oil Sunflower Review
We attempted to grow BLUE sunflowers… did they have blue petals? let’s see how it went. From our “Thou Shalt Garden” Series, …
📹 Seed Scams.There Are No Blue Roses, Blue Sunflowers, or Cat Face Flowers
I’ve been seeing these scam ads for seeds for quite a few years now, but decided it was time to dig a little bit deeper… Join the …
Afterthoughts & Addenda Cat Flower SEO – You’re right, nobody should think those could possibly real, but consider: Those product listings are probably clickbait – maybe the scammer has no intention of selling cat flower seeds, but all the people who click on the cat flower seed ad, out of curiosity, boredom or in order to laugh at it, are creating a pattern of traffic to the seller’s website, and that traffic helps the site rise in search engine rankings and the like. You Should Have Waited To Publish if You Wanted To Really Prove There Are No Blue Sunflowers – No. The scam was happening while it is Spring in the northern hemisphere; the appropriate time for the scam warning is always ASAP. The results of the sunflower trial will be published in exactly the same timescale as they would have been if I waited to publish this article, but if I waited, the scam would no longer be happening for this year. You don’t wait for your entire house to burn down before calling out the emergency services. This article wasn’t really about proving I am right – it’s about discussing a type of scam, but on the subject of ‘proof’, this way is more scientific anyway – I have published my hypothesis in this article; the experiment is now underway; the results will prove or disprove it – I think the former but whatever happens, I can’t go back and conveniently change the hypothesis published in this timestamped uploaded article to fit the actual results. Crossing Borders – it’s probably not the best idea to even buy seeds from this sort of market, where they are almost certainly being flown or shipped in from who-knows-where; there are phytosanitary regulations about what sort of plant material you should and should not import, and I imagine these sellers completely ignore that.
I work at a plant nursery and it’s not uncommon we get elderly customers showing us amazon listings for tropical plants or flowers that simply don’t exist. They don’t get short with us, they just keep holding out hope that our information is incorrect and a different garden center will carry them, which is the saddest part. One sweet woman comes in every year with the same highly-edited aglaonema and angel-wing begonia pictures, and tells us she’ll just keep waiting for us to carry them instead of accepting our honesty.
6:09 – I loathe that ‘jiggling button’ effect. It’s condescending. I’m not a toddler or pet eagerly awaiting some toy or treat. Sometimes there aren’t other options, but when there are, I’ll do business with the vendor who shows some basic respect for their customers (and themselves). Cheap tactics like a jiggling button feel like a warning flag for a potential scam.
A woman I work with excitedly showed me a pic on her phone from a Facebook post of these cat flowers. She was so enthralled. When I told her they were not real she wouldn’t have it. She told me “Look. It says here they ARE real!” All I said is “I just don’t think so but if you do, you do.” I couldn’t argue with her. She was convinced. Lol
To obtain blue roses, you will need: 1 Nintendo Switch, 1 Animal Crossing New Horizons cartridge. Within the game, buy several rose seeds of red, yellow and white, follow the instructions found on any number of helpful YouTube articles, and with a lot of hard work (and maybe some time travelling) you too can have blue roses. 😀
We need to de-stigmatize and eliminate the culture of shaming people who fall for scams. Scammers use this to protect themselves as people don’t want to admit that they have been scammed so they reduce their chances of getting their money back or prosecuting the scammers. Also just talking about it brings the scams in to the light and shows how they operate and educate people who might have fallen for the scam. Also high pressure sales use a lot of tactics that scammers do (time pressures, creating a sense of rarity etc) so talking and learning about scams can help in other aspects of commerce.
Fun fact–there actually is a Blue Boy dahlia (not rose), but it’s a lavender-purple. It’s a fun dahlia that’s featured year after year in my garden here and it should grow beautifully through most of the US and UK (it will need lifting and storage in any place where the soil freezes for winter). “Black” dahlia are even rarer (really a deep, dark red-almost-black). If you really want cats in your garden, plant cat mint, cat grass, or other items that cats love. You’ll attract plenty.
I had a friend spend hundreds of dollars on scam seeds a few years ago. I told him when he started showing me pictures that the plants were not real, he did not believe me and classified me as overly skeptical. The worst part is that most of the seeds sprouted, but his greenhouse blew over in a storm and most of the seedlings died. He then ordered more seeds online… the second time around it was pretty clear they sent random seeds when his roses all turned into lettuce. I found it very sad that he pretty much quit gardening after that.
By the time we got to the middle portion there I’d found myself learning the same lesson just from perusal the article, because when I saw those AI cat flowers I was straight into “scoff at anyone who thinks these super fake AI pictures are real” mode, only to then be faced with those blue sunflowers that if you hadn’t pointed out and explained the problem with I think I would have been pretty accepting of those as legit. So a quite quick and humbling lesson of “obvious is not universal.” I think it’s useful to be reminded of that, it never hurts to be a little more understanding.
An important factor you didn’t mention, Atomic Shrimp, is that seeds are HEAVILLY regulated as imports/exports, requiring an especial permit to do so. “To import plants and other items in the high-priority category, you will need to obtain a phytosanitary certificate.” claims the UK government. So, of course, ANY “international vendor” of seeds is going to require an accomplice in the country of destination, which is why yours got to you from Birmingham, since they cannot sell them to you internationally.
Misleading photos of plants pre-dates the internet – although obviously not to the extent seen in those crazy examples you showed here. Back in the seventies, when a lot of plants were bought from mail order catalogues, I remember listening to an episode of Radio 4’s “Gardeners Question Time” where a grouchy old panellist (with the splendid name of Bill Sowerbutts) was warning people about the unnaturally vibrant colours seen in their photos.
Thank you for encouraging patience and sympathy toward the victims of these scams. It’s not that those people are dumb, it’s that they’re naive or uninformed. They might just expect Facebook or Amazon to review their ads and product listings and aggressively police fraud; which is not really unreasonable given the world most of us grew up in.
My mother got a rose seedling as a “free gift” from her bank back in the day (1960s?). It was NOT a rooted cutting–it was a seedling. Probably culled by a rose breeder and nearly free to the bank. It grew into a miniature rose with tiny leaves, blooms about 2.5″ (5 cm) across similar to Cecile Bruner except vivid magenta with white at the base of each petal and an incredible scent. It grew well as cuttings, and I still kick myself for not bringing cuttings when someone bought the duplex we lived in (mid 1980s). The blue roses, sunflowers, strawberries are obvious to you–and the hue rotation is obvious to me from learning Lightroom & Photoshop.
When I was growing up, there used to be a shop called Horseplay, and they sold gifts that would be appropriate for the name. Stinkbombs, novelty gifts, etc. They even sold “special seeds”, where it would sprout an attractive man or woman if you plant it. The seed packets had instructions and pictures of the results. These seeds remind me of these.
I ordered a bunch of seeds from a store called Yugenbonsai, the idea that the seeds could’ve been tampered or fake never even occurred to me when I had blamed myself for improperly trying to germinate that. Exceptional example of how you can potentially fall for one scam even if you are well versed in something else. I’d never consider myself likely to fall for a scam relating to computer hardware but cannot even tell if the above was or wasn’t a scam. Very good article.
You ht the nail on the head with the whole “who falls for this stuff, anyways?” bit. I know many people who like plants and like to grow them but aren’t anything more than a novice who would see listings like the ones shown in this article and would probably buy them in a heartbeat. THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS article!!!
An anime I watched recently called “The Apothecary Diaries” actually had artificial blue roses as a plot point in one section. An antagonist character gave the mc the task of growing him blue roses since he knew it was impossible, but she took the challenge and used the dyeing method, in order to complete it. (Super good show btw, I highly highly recommend)
I am in the aquarium / aquatic plants hobby, a very common scam along a similar line to this that I see newbies falling for often are “aquatic plant seeds” specifically advertised as “carpeting plants”, that aren’t ever what’s advertised, or even aquatic. What ends up happening is the newbies plant them in their tanks, they germinate and grow for a little bit before starting to rot and messing up their tanks.
Damn, that’s like the worst kind of scam because growing is flower is like 10% initial investment into seeds and then 90% energy spent to grow it. Usually when someone gets scammed a scammer just takes 100% of the value, but here they take 10% and 90% is just…gone Basically a scammer is hurting the scamee way more than they are enriching themselves
Coincidentally, I reported just such a scam on Amazon recently. The seller used the cat picture as the appetiser. Then, when you looked at the rest of the pics they eventually showed clover growing in an untidy pot. Surprisingly, lots of the cat flowers had been sold despite having only one star. That Amazon allowed the scam is really bad.
Scam I’ve noticed recently is getting SMS messages telling me that I have a package to be delivered but it has somehow been damaged and they can’t read the address, so they want me to click on this entirely innocent link and give them my address. Which leaves me wondering how they have my phone number to contact me but not the address that goes with it, particularly since I think with most places I would receive packages from it would be the other way around. And could they not just contact the place they are supposedly delivering for? I think they might have the address they sent the package to. I was almost fooled the first time I saw this, but did some checking to see if it was a known scam, and it was. I find I am a much less trusting individual these days.
Another great tip for spotting scams is looking at the pictures. If every listing has the exact same product image, or if some listings look like an entirely different product, it’s probably an altered photo and likely a scam/misleading product (or at least VERY low quality and not worth your effort).
I really appreciate your work here. You give thorough, well considered explanations, you don’t assign blame to those that are peripheral to the scam and you give a great breakdown of the different layers. I helped to create a website designed to teach seniors about scams, so it’s a topic close to my heart, and this is great work.
one thing to note, I could totally believe blue sunflowers exist, they’d HAVE TO BE GMO however and due to their proud “nongmo” announcements (and the fact that there isn’t any news about it, I’d expect some news agency to pick that up) makes me quite confident that they are not going to produce blue flowers.
Scams aside, there is a pretty big industry in selling weird and hard to grow seeds online dressed up as gimmicky gifts for amateurs. I often receive them because people know i like gardening – it’s often something incredibly painstaking to germinate like carnivorous plants/orchids, or they promise fruits that i know will never materialise in a UK climate (like dragonfruit). Tellingly, the care instructions are often very light on details and don’t go beyond the germination stage. Not quite a scam but a bit of a grey area.
Thank you for always having a compassionate, empathetic, and humble attitude towards scam victims. You’re right, no one knows everything, and scams come in all varieties. Anyone can be targeted and fooled of the right scammer comes along and targets a vulnerability or area of uncertainty/inexperience.
Thanks for calling attention to this – I have gardened for years, but still have my head turned by the less obvious scams on occasion, particularly when it comes to claims of unusual varieties. I know a little but not enough. I love the photo of you and Eva- she looks like your supportive side-kick in your scam-fighting buddy cop show.
I collect rare plants, many of which come from trusted sellers on Ebay, and I can’t tell you how MANY obviously fake seeds show up in my recommended, but there’s nothing I can really do to report them unless I try to order them first. It’s very frustrating, so I’m glad someone is trying to spread the word about it.
I was growing some blue sunflowers but my pet unicorn ate them all. If there wasn’t the “NO GMO” thing then someone may be able to make a blue sunflower but that would cost massively and I don’t see much return on it being likely unlike Canola Oil or the Ruby Grapefruit. ** What is below is incorrect read the correcting comment below * Ruby Grapefruit is a bit of an interesting story because it was made by irradiating a massive number of grapefruits and growing fields full of them and then selecting the mutant that they liked. Fortunately in the process they didn’t make trees that eat people or anything like that.
I recently found a shop on Etsy selling supposed crochet patterns for numerous amigarumi things…but the photos were sooooo perfect, that when i looked closer at this picture that had “crochet hooks” in the background, what i saw was a wooden handle and then a tapering metal section that ended in a round ball ontop, not a hook. That led me down the rabbit hole of AI generated images. There was quite the number of poor sods who actually ordered from the shop, some putting in something like 75 dollars, just to receive a half written pattern to make a flat rectangle, or a randome pdf to print out that turned out to be someone’s backside or a very grainy image of the mona lisa or whatever. Be careful out there people
This is a great article! A few years ago, I was browsing impossible seed listings on Amazon to amuse myself, but it was sad to read the reviews. So many people left 5 star reviews, saying things like “I can’t wait for them to germinate!” I remember one person wrote about how his late wife loved a certain type of flower and he was excited to grow a new type or color as a way of remembering her. Even looking now I can find a 5 star, verified purchase review for a listing for rainbow-colored rose seeds saying “Beautiful rose I have not planted my rose”
Side note. I’ve been buying my seeds on eBay every year for about 20 years now. There are all kinds of scammers there. So when I try a new seller, I pick one in my own country, look for reviews spanning several years, and I read all of them. I’ve been lucky so far. Why eBay, I don’t know. I spend weeks researching, online and in shops. I live in a big city where garden centers are a dime a dozen. eBay has consistently given me the best deals: local varieties, good amount, fresh seeds, clear instructions, for the best price. This year, new seller, every single seed has bloomed and my seller and I have been corresponding regularly, long after germination. Just a nice honest bloke. So of course, Mike is right. Scammers are everywhere. Even in online garden centers where they show you pictures of a 10-year-old plant to sell seedlings. Those pictures make me really angry. Gardening is not for Instagram. No blue flowers, no rainbow fruits, no magical growth in European weather. But I’ll be growing roughly half my fruit and veg this year, on a balcony in the city. For me, that’s the true magic.
I agree with what you said. Everyone can fall for a specific scam if they’re not cautious enough, I’ve seen it happen to freelancers whose customers ask for a job without paying upfront, or even claiming to have overpaid, asking for that money to be returned and then the app will take the money since the clients account was most likely a stolen account.
Wow, out of this entire article, you referring to your postman made me flashback hard to my childhood. We had the same mailman for the entire time I was growing up, and after I left for the Army, he still kept delivering to the neighborhood. Turns out both of us ended up in Colorado, he lives about an hour south of me today, and Randy was the greatest Postal guy I ever knew, he could get a package to the correct address with half a label every time. Excellent episode Mike, I never got into the scam stuff before, but as time has gone on I’ve kind of gotten snared by all your content, lol. Please give Eva a treat and a hug, she’s the best girl.
i do wish you’d ordered some of the animal faced flowers. i had assumed that the outlandish colored flowers would be normal or maybe even variants that do occur, they would just fob you off with “well seeds can have recessive genes” or some bunk. the animal faced things though i have no idea what they would send.
For those who like to say “but who could could fall for that?” I’d like to raise my hand up as a possible victim. I’m a university grad in my 20’s, who grew up on an internet surrounded by scams and bad actors, and so I can identify some of the warning signs of common scams, but I’m very new to gardening (just 3 windowsills of pots at the moment), and so lack the knowledge needed to avoid some of these. Sure, I would have seen that the animal faced flowers are clearly fake, but I’d also have said that the corrected image of the Begonia was also fake, and I didn’t know that blue roses or sunflowers were impossible, or that roses were never sold as seeds. The more convincing rose images might well have caught me. I also just bought a packet of blue flower seeds ironically today, but it was from my local Asda so I think I’m safe!
It’s really sad that this is happening because I seen an old woman on our Facebook garden community buy one of these scam seeds not knowing that it was a scam, and then her being confused when people were telling her that this wasn’t real, the worst part about it was that the page was taken down and she couldn’t get a refund after that.
I appreciate how you always find a way to poke fun at scammers but are so respectful and compassionate towards people that are scammed. Your articles are always thoughtful and delightful. Thank you! Also cool to see that you watch fruit explorer articles. Both of your wholesome websites make the world feel more full of wonder.
Based on the pink package you’re opening at 16:55, I believe the website creators are the scammers and in this case the shipped product is real but mislabelled. This looks like something to be given out at a baby shower and the reason there’s no contact info is because the people you would be contacting is the soon-to-be parents who gave them to you at the shower.
I just want to say thanks for educating people on all this. I just prevented my mom spending a lot of money on fake cat-themed sweaters (some ai generated/photoshop thing I think) but I noticed how much effort they put in the fake site. It had fake trustpilot reviews embedded on the site, a clean ui, a (invalid) dutch chamber of commerce registration number and a whole backstory on their brand.
Another less obvious scam on ebay is selling seeds that are so old that literally none of them sprout, while everything else is doing fine under the same conditions. I fell for several packs of less common squash and pumpkin varieties three years ago and none of the flowers i also ordered sprouted either
I remember seeing all these kind of fake seed listings on eBay a few years ago. One thing that concerned me is the potential for harmful or invasive plant species to be shipped from foreign countries, and then some clueless soul just wreaks havok on the local ecosystem because they don’t know what they’re doing 💀
This particular scam feels distinct from the rest. Despite the similar implementation, the idea of selling something to beginners (assuming anyone believing in the possibility of blue sunflowers is probably not a seasoned gardener), at a somewhat reasonable/affordable price point, with tracked delivery and seeds as promised, means any possible suspicion at this point of a scam can equally be dismissed as a gardening skill issue, both by the scam victim and anyone they inquire with. Love these vids, not just the ‘is it a scam’ question but the when, how and why analysis is very valuable.
there is a quite spectacular F1 hybrid sunflower variety of “Red” sunflowers out there which have the same fully black seed. If they tried, they could at least use those and at least justifiably wow the customer and either satisfy their desire for some wierd flower or at least make it appear that they do in fact stock some amazing varieties and make the customer go “well they mustve just got it wrong this time, ill try again next year” The red sunflowers I grew were a brilliant red and black combination, verynice, would recommend, though being an F1 hybrid means you cant really keep them going past the first year. maybe someone will be able to keep a population of them going at a scale large enough to make a true cultivar of them some day.
Your article just stirred a childhood memory. When I was little my grandma called the antirrhinums in her garden “bunny rabbits” and showed me how to play with the flowers. I know they are commonly called snapdragons because they look like a dragon’s head, so maybe I turned the flowers upside down. It’s too long ago. I can’t quite remember…
13:34 thank you for this. These scams are so obvious for some of us but i imagine what if was my grandmother or even my mom. Being older and seeing so many new technologies that are challenging for me to understand. I probably would believe it if someone told me they were able to breed blue melons and sunflowers.
It’s really quite satisfying when you buy stuff online from obvious scams. It’s interesting to see what happens, it scratches an itch I have of wondering what happens… without having to risk my own money and personal information. Stay safe out there Mr Shrimp! How did you come up with that name by the way?
I actually fell for this “scam” almost a decade ago, I wanted to plant some osiria roses (you’ll know it when you google a pic of one, it’s the red and white rose that was everywhere on social media) and I could only find seeds. They never germinated, and I had followed the instructions to fake a winter and such. The actual flower is beautiful, but social media folks edited the photo to make it seem impossibly red/white or they change the color to some impossible combination. Now I know these roses are real, but it’s incredibly hard to find a trustworthy seller to sell you either clippings for a graft or proper osiria rose seeds. I have yet to find a seller of the actual plant. (If you know of a trustworthy US seller, let me know!)
This is all very odd. There are hundreds on eBay, even a green rose! It can’t be good for genuine seed sellers because they will be losing business to these scammers. Charity shops are another good place to find seeds by the way. I did have to double check the blue cornflower seeds I ordered last month but as you know, blue cornflowers do exist!
Out of morbid curiosity just like you, I ordered some seeds that were supposedly rainbow colored roses. I ordered them off of Amazon and they weren’t super expensive. They sent them out right away and I was able to track the order via amazon. They sent me seeds just like they sent you seeds. I have roses in my garden and I know what rose seeds should look like even if most people do not use them to grow roses. These seeds looked a lot like oversized greenish brown sesame seeds. I’m not sure what kind of seeds they actually are, but whatever they were, they did not grow. I also noticed not long after placing my order, Amazon started making all kinds of recommendations for all sorts of other flower seeds like the ones you showed us in this article and it was a while before they stopped doing that.
Quick note on the odd labeling: They send a buttload of small items like this over as a single huge pallet bin, which is super cheap when divided up, and only needs the one customs form, declaration papers, etc. Then when it reaches the service’s depot, they break all the packs out, print and affix the labels, and cheapo-mail them to the final recipient. That’s why you’ll get a relatively local, generic label that just resolves to an industrial park someplace.
Challenge accepted: grow white sunflowers/roses/whatever, build a centre-pivot irrigation system, and introduce food colouring into their garden bed by centre-pivot. Negative side effects include groundwater discolouration which may poison those allergic to blue food colouring, and prolonged contamination of the soil with the same colouring.
Ah the moonmelon What a classic Over here across the pond my grandma tried to buy some blue roses from what is actually considered to be a pretty reputable gardening catalog At least she got cuttings Ended up chalking the difference in color up to the color printing in the catalog being off or the lighting in the photo of the roses being weird
I remember reading somewhere that blueish flowers are simply white flowers that have been watered with a solution containing coloring agents. The solution is absorbed through the roots and could tint the flowers a bit. Obviously it isn’t permanent but it could probably make for a good party trick if it actually works.
I hate those “count-down on our limited-time deal” things. They just reset & pop back up under a slightly different brand heading a week later. It was bad enough seeing them on Instagram ads (I bought a cheap fountain pen from one), but I’ve seen them on medical charity pages I had been led to believe we’re actually good & reputable. Disgusting.
thank you for making this. I love coleus and at one point had more than 20 varieties and was active in a gardener’s group for people who like coleus – so I used to get TONS of these coleus ads. I struggle with people who also just… don’t believe me when I try to explain nicely that blue foliage will never ever happen. I’ve since stopped growing most of them because they don’t take well to the environment I have – but can confirm, never ever seen a blue coleus 😂
I’ve had one of those “blue” roses. It was a beautifully delicate lavender color variety called Silver Cloud. Poor things were extremely prone to black spot fungus and aphids, and my mom was always confused why her habit of cutting them down to a single stalk every fall didn’t result in long stems of single blossoms, no matter how many times I told her that Silver Cloud is not a tea rose.
i really like your point about how people falling for scams doesn’t mean they’re dumb, or that there are knowledgeable people in some things that can still fall for scams in other stuff, like for example, roses aren’t a flower you tend to see in the wild in my country, so many people would probably believe that blue roses do exist (i only know they don’t because of a piece of trivia in a sports manga lol). In my case it would honestly be 50/50 on whether i notice something suspicious enough to google if blue roses are real and realize it’s a scam (specially because i know shit about plants). In the end, you just don’t know what you don’t know. All we can do is keep a certain level of skepticism when buying something.
About couple of years ago, I was looking online for different seeds as I started a patio garden. One company, which I don’t remember the name had obviously fake pictures of totally impossible vegetables colors and flowers. And this was before the sudden popularity of AI (even though AI existed for quite some time). I wasn’t foolish enough to buy any of the seats because I know they could not be real. I’m not even sure the company was real at all.
Fun fact: flower color, shape, scent and size have co-evolved with different pollinators’ preferences to the point that botanists have been able to identify “pollination syndromes”: that is, certain traits associated with a certain pollinator. Butterflies prefer flat and red/purple flowers, while moth-pollinated flowers are usually colorless and invest instead in a strong scent. Bees detect UV and often choose the flowers which contrast best to their environment, which is sometimes blue. It’s not always so cut-and-dry but sometimes you can tell if there’s a preference for one pollinator over another.
Some scams are just baffling to me. I got s text message the other day. The person called herself Mia and claimed to be working for the HR department of a site that mainly reviews hotels. She promised me 700€ a day to review hotels remotely from the comfort of my home… I’m not quite sure how one would review hotels without staying at the location of said hotel.
Flashlights on Amazon are amazingly scam filled. There are plenty, maybe even the majority, that claim physically impossible combinations of lumen output and battery life, often Lumen outputs an order of magnitude or more above what’s remotely believable. Easily enough to set things on fire with the beambat close range without any additional magnifying lens.
Other scams I’ve seen a lot is people selling a rare variation of something like a pothos or whatever. They send a node and say it’ll change as it grows but it will never change because its not special. The other one is claiming to sell seeds using real pictures but of plants that are extememly rare of expensive at a discount price.
God it’s awful to think that literally every field is now full of scams. There’s nothing you can trust anymore and that really sucks. But I guess in a way snake oil and scams like this have always been a thing, it’s just how they’re very accessible. Hopefully this means future generations will develop very reliable scam detection skills and these industries will collapse since it’s unlikely regulation will ever prevent the sale of these products.
Animal Crossing features blue roses as a particularly rare variant you can breed. I could easily see, for at least those seed scams, kids or young people whos only experience with roses is the AC games, who thinks its real because the other fish, bugs, and plants in the game ARE real, thinking blue roses can exist, and excitedly buying the seeds to have some irl.
8:30 – I’d like to offer a prediction of my own, kind of an “approximately correct, V2”. They send seeds for a flower that somewhat resembles the advertised flower in the advertised color. Such as Lisianthus instead of blue roses. A novice wouldn’t know the difference, they’d genuinely believe they got roses!
It’s so sad imagining some poor old lady or whoever with too pure and innocent view of the world, wanting to buy and grow some really cool and cute flowers, only, to be…scammed. 😞-it’s not THE worst way to be scammed, but sure is disappointing and…sad, but at least it teaches a good lesson not to trust everything you see online.
Presumably GMO sunflowers would require a lot of testing and licensing etc because it is a potential food product. It is pretty common for people studying plants in labs to introduce different coloured or fluorescent proteins to study where specific genes get turned on so if someone unscrupulous wanted to it presumably wouldn’t be too hard to produce some of those colours into plants particularly in places without chloroplasts.
i’m unsure if it was an international issue, but at least in the USA, there was a huge problem with unverified, unlabeled seeds appearing in people’s mail unmarked a few years ago. seeds, like the pined comment says, are highly regulated as invasive species can quite literally wipe out native flora and decimate the landscape for fauna. i remember countless news stories about it and requests from the government to send in all seeds recieved with unknown origins. i don’t know what ever happened with it, but i have a sneaking suspicion that the seeds were being sent through amazon drop shippers hoping to get POD with cheap bulk seeds. i can’t share the source of my belief for privacy reasons, but what i saw pretty much convinced me– especially when it suddenly seemed to disappear from the media. obviously it’s just a theory i have though, there might’ve been a regular explanation that doesn’t seem as sinister.
Blue roses are one of my favourite flowers. Which is weird to say, because they aren’t naturally occurring and the only ‘true’ blue roses have ever been a shade of purple. They’re called the Suntory blue rose and it’s an ongoing project since 1990 and they came to be in I think 2002. I highly recommend anyone interested to look into it but to those that know, it’s always awful seeing all those products for supposed blue roses being purchased in droves. There’s a reason why some people say blue roses represent ‘attaining the impossible’
The blue sunflowers also seemed to have a stop sign in the back (or some sort of street sign) that turned blue as well. Edit for 17track, Its not a scam per say but it used for a lot of over seas shipping. Particularly out of China. I use a claw machine game that uses them for shipping as well. It is a very slow update system but it is legit. I have received all things shipped from them but they tend to take about a month or two to arrive.
A certain father in law I used to know had 3-4 Blue Girls planted around his front yard, not because it’s a great purple hybrid tea, but because the same seed catalog he bought all his stuff from every year would run the same turquoise colored print image of one huge flower on a whole page and advertise as “the new true-blue rose” without listing it’s actual name. I guess he figured one of these days if he kept trying reality would just change for him.
As an avid gardener these ads annoy the heck out of me. Blue dahlia’s, roses, or other impossible things. Flowers in ridiculous shapes, sometimes an exaggeration of a real flower (I once saw something looking like a fractal, awesome but obviously fake). I often am looking for special varieties, and I avoid Amazon, chinese sites and such like the plague. But when I google something they can fill the first pages with nonsense. And ofcourse the fact that some people do fall for this. So sad.
If you live in the United States and don’t have a local flower shop or place to get seeds, there’s always a gardening section at Home Depot that’ll sell cheap seeds. I’m 90% sure Lowes has the same thing, but I haven’t been to one in a very long time. Either way, don’t worry too much if you live somewhere rural, there’s usually one of those chains within a 30 minute drive. Its also convenient since you could get seeds, soil, tools, and materials to build a plant box or garden all at the same place.
I grow carnivorous plants as a hobby. There are some scammers out there for these, but because the community tends to be high-knowledge, they mostly target people who aren’t part of the hobby. In fact, you’re more likely to get scammed in-store with those little plastic boxes labeled “KILLER PLANT.” Most of those are potted inadequately and packaged with incorrect growing instructions, and sometimes are already long-dead in the store, since most carnivorous plants require airflow and high sun, but are invariably kept indoors. The packagers know this, and will put notifications on the box that the plant may appear dead, but is actually just dormant.
I almost bought this for black roses! There are such things as profoundly dark red roses that appear to have rich blackish tones. But we were told by actual horticulturists that black rose shoots or cuttings don’t exist for sale because they are jealously guarded by growers who sell blooms at a premium. I thought maybe some rogue growers had obtained cuttings. Glad I didn’t fall for it!
A couple years ago i was looking for heritage tomato seeds on amazon, came across a bunch of ‘rainbow’ tomato seeds that were obviously fake, like the different colours all the same plant, or even multicoloured tomatoes, i reported a bunch of them as scams and a month later they were still available 😒
I nearly fell for the cat flower, despite being an experienced gardener and consumer! I checked the Latin name and then looked it up, it quickly became clear that the advertised cat flower was not possible and I did not buy. I totally understand what you said about people shopping for gifts, but knowing nothing about the topic, so easy to fall for these scams.
Seed scams are even nastier in the bonsai hobby. People sell ‘bonsai seed kits’ that are a pot, maybe some soil if you’re lucky, and seeds for an actual tree. It seems ok on the surface, but if you think about it, it gets so much shadier. No one who takes bonsai seriously as a hobby actually grows from seed. Maybe as a fun little side project, but never as a main thing. The steps for those kits are basically “Step 1: plant the seed. Step 2: wait a decade and then you’re ready to do a bonsai’
Speaking of how to plant sunflower seeds- From my experience with feeding birds sunflowers are very good at growing almost no matter the circumstances. We’ve got quite a few growing accidentally in our planters because the birds are such messy eaters. We also have plenty of wheat and other mystery grasses. The wheat often grows even if it doesn’t fall into dirt, so long as it gets wet when it rains, of course it can’t survive that way forever but it does make a truly valiant effort to grow despite lacking dirt. I personally think it makes our balcony feel more alive and mum doesn’t complain, not about the sunflowers at least, so overall it’s probably a win. 🙂
The 17track website isn’t a scam, become they basically just aggregate the information from many shipping websites, but since it isn’t the website of the actual shipping carrier or even an official website from the mail service anywhere, it is usually where scammers tell people to look for their shipping code. Because a lot of the legit websites will show you some information about the shipping, like the area of destination, the kind of thing being shipped, etc, and what those scammers do is that they send something (it can be anything) to someone (it can be anyone’s, they can be literally sending a toy gift to a nephew or something, or even them sending an empty to someone that is part of the scam) and then they give you the number for that thing, that way there is something being shipped and people will think it is coming until it is too late to get a refund.
THE RAINBOW ROSES. UGH. A family friend spent money on “rainbow rose” seeds, and my mom was so excited to buy her own. I told both of them it was a scam. I said it again and again, and even pulled up multiple articles and multiple reviews to prove it. My mom’s response? “Well, you never know, it’d be fun to see just in case!” It will be a shock to nobody (except me apparently) that I recently learned this woman doesn’t even believe evolution is real. My own mother. MY OWN MOTHER.
I’ve long been annoyed by the Tri** Water Gardens (a reputable grower) editing their “blue” water lily species to be electric blue, brilliant cerulean, and other (currently) impossible genetic variants. Why they, and other plant catalogs, do this is a mystery, as it only generates disappointment and anger from hopeful customers, who trusted such unlikely varieties were possible. However, one flower will actually be that elusive, impossible blue, the most gorgeous cerulean blue imaginable: Mecanopsis betonicifolia, or M. Bailyi, the Himalayan blue poppy. It needs cold winters and cool summers, but it is extraordinary.
i get that it takes a long time, but id honestly prefer waiting months for the completed article than anxiously waiting to see part 2 if the plant grows because im going to forget about it by the time that happens. or at the very least just say “well they didnt grow” because we wont even get a second article if that happens.
Regarding the question of who falls for these scams I have a thought on that, based on my experience. Person in my family. It’s not about what you know about particular thing, it’s about how trusting you are. Some people simply won’t apply critical thinking on principle even if they are good at it. My grandmother would fall for these one hundred percent, despite gardening for like four decades. She took care of acres of land, family was fed from that land. She also created beautiful flower and fruit gardens, is experienced at tree grafting, etc. She knows plants, seeds, selection process. But if shown these she’d say “scam? What do you mean? Why would anyone lie about this?”. Some people just can’t wrap their head around the fact that lies are everywhere. And lies for profit are truly never ending.
I fell for seed scams before – I felt safe because it was a brick and mortar store, not a webshop. Turns out Amsterdam street sellers don’t have any more integrity than the average online scammer (tulips were different varieties than advertised, none of the other plants – including some where I should have known better – grew at all)
There’s been one I’ve been a bit unsure of for a while. Every now and again, I have seen people claim to have seeds for Butterfly Peas whose flowers are supposed to be red, yellow, or black. As far as I know, those aren’t real (just blue, white, pink and lavender). But online info seems evasive (some say the other colors exist but are rare, others make no mention of them.)
0:18 A couple years ago I fell for that multicolor rose seeds. I didn’t consider my return wouldn’t be accepted 18 months after I had a few obviously distinct phenotypes old enough to flower outdoors. I have gotten some amazing color fading from inside to outside with certain fertilizers/microorganism nutrients I had left over from growing cannabis years ago. Just dumb luck I wouldn’t know how to reproduce though 🙃
Imagine every single party involved is individually innocent and the entire thing got produced by a mix of poorly communicated marketing decisions and Kafkaesque compartmentalization of the logistical infrastructure, with the scam not being conceived by any individual in the logistical chain but existing as an emergent property of the logistical chain itself?