...if you are an orchid fan...

forewarning: no warm fuzzy feelings and no sprouts in this post.

so, i was skimming the garden supply catalogs my mom gets at work when i ran across an extremely weird thing. it kind of disturbs me.

remember in elementary school when you would put a nasty white carnation in blue food-coloring and water and the next morning, your white flower had turned blue? so, they are now doing that to orchids. except it is apparently a "patented" top-secret process.

there is a new phalaenopsis orchid out (those are the common kind you see all over Lowe's and supermarkets) called 'Blue Mystique' that is the most horrifying unsettling shade of electric, Crayola-blue you will ever see on a flower. (hopefully. it can't get much worse than this, i'm assuming.) according to the nursery that "invented" this flower, the white orchids are "infused" with "naturally derived" blue "medium" in a "patented" process that takes 48-90 hours.
 ...what?
i researched this process and essentially they are injecting the roots of white orchids with blue dye, so that the flower blooms blue. once. if you ever get your orchid to rebloom, it will rebloom pale blue or probably white.

the grossest thing about the whole elementary-school-experiment-gone-awry? my kroger in germantown is selling them.

what is the world coming to?

yuck.