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Déjà Vu Blues
| John Friel
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>> Published Date: 4/25/2012
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 When I first saw Blue Mystique orchids at a trade show, I smiled. Neat gimmick, I thought. Not something I’d buy, but not unattractive. Good luck.
Then the hoopla started. Silver Vase Nursery, the grower who injected white phalaenopsis with blue dye, has been assailed for “trickery,” its product called “an insult to all true botanists—past, present and future.” Wow.
So, here we go again. Doesn’t this backlash sound familiar? This time it’s orchids, but haven’t we heard similar debates on the evils of dosing perennials with PGRs, the immorality of tarting up poinsettias with paint and glitter, and so on?
It’s reminiscent of the uproar Ted Turner triggered by daring to colorize classic movies, heresy in the eyes of black-and-white cinematistas. One can’t help but wonder why some utterly unnatural acts are condoned, others condemned.
There’s nothing natural about braiding a ficus, grafting a chunk of one cactus onto another, stunting trees into tiny bonsai form or crucifying them to create ornamental espaliers, or irradiating mums to force mutations.
Have you ever seen the pallid, ugly, etiolated plants in a virus-indexing growth chamber? Does the term “embryo rescue” ring a bell? It’s not a red-state election-year issue, it’s a radical, or should I say radicle, technique breeders use to coax new plants from feeble hybrid seeds that could never germinate naturally. If it’s okay to manipulate soil pH to turn pink hydrangeas blue, or vice versa, why is it a big deal to introduce a decorative dye into an orchid’s vascular system?
In 2006 I visited English garden centers and was amazed to find cheap 4-in. pots—excuse me, 12-cm. pots—of heaths and heathers. A lovely plant that American growers don’t bother with because it can’t handle our steamy summers is a UK commodity, sold dyed in gaudy hues as a novelty.
One center owner smiled ruefully and confessed he found dyed heathers tacky, then shrugged, “But they sell.” When I told him U.S. growers did similar things with poinsettias, he frowned and chided, “Oh, that’s just wrong!”
Orchid fanciers were once nearly a cult. Recent breeding has remade their touchy exotic as an easy-to-handle, affordable pot crop for Everyman. The idea of dyeing them to entice buyers is astonishing not because it’s evil but because it speaks volumes about what breeders can do when they focus on a crop, be it coreopsis or phalaenopsis.
Oddly, the closest parallel between anything in this rap sheet of erstwhile alleged crimes against nature and the current dyed orchid flap is probably the case of the PGR-laced perennials. Critics of the colored orchid say consumers were misled, and will be disappointed when their plants bloom white, not the shades of blue (there are three, so far) they bought. Similarly, some fretted that consumers would be outraged when their cute, compact rudbeckia revealed its true shaggy self in Year 2 after the wicked chemical spell wore off.
Shakespeare cautioned that “to paint the lily” is “wasteful and ridiculous excess,” but he wasn’t playing to a jaded 21st-Century audience. PGR’d perennials and pimped poinsettias are facts of life, and the world continues to revolve. Injecting B&W movies with color may be the devil’s doing, but it exposed Casablanca to a larger audience.
Sometimes people don’t know they want a thing until they see it. Henry Ford wasn’t much for focus groups; the only feedback he cared about was sales. “If I had asked people what they wanted,” he once said, “They would have said ‘Faster horses.’” As a marketing type, expected to care passionately about customer taste (or lack thereof), I should hate that sentiment. But I don’t.
There is one unnatural act that puts a burr under my saddle: the sin of dyeing beer green on St. Patrick’s Day. THAT is an abomination. Anyone who indulges in it has earned the hangover from Hades. Those who serve it deserve an infestation of snakes.
But decorating a poinsettia, dyeing an orchid, gilding a lily? This too shall pass—into obscurity and out of memory, or into common practice. Those orchids may look fake. Some may say they are fake. But the money and publicity they’re generating is quite real. GP
John Friel is marketing manager for Emerald Coast Growers and a freelance writer.
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