#the ornamental plant industry is off the SHITS

[honeynutmalcontent]

This is a saga of whatthefuckery of industrial horticulture proportions. Just bananas. Just absolutely batshit. Educational, for sure—the science and politics of GE plants are fascinating! and I know to look out for those white pots now and, y’know, not buy them—but this post is just a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, @trilliannc This was an excellent Sunday afternoon bitch-you-need-to-sit-tf-down-and-rest distraction.

whats the deal with proven winners?

okay. so. this is actually how i got into botany in the first place; i got an unpaid internship at a greenhouse in high school and realized, very quickly, that we live in a jurassic park hellscape where big companies breed plants solely for their looks and performance, and i found that so fucking weird that i couldnt get enough of it and fell down the rabbit hole. i don’t find them bad per say; i find them weird and how they manage their product in terms of policing their retailers is very sketchy to me, but they’re not like, monstanto-level off the shits (yet). with mother’s day next weekend we’re coming up on one of the biggest greenhouse/ornamental plant industry sales days of the year, next to valentines’ day (which favors the rose industry especially), so this is an exceptionally convenient time to talk about this. 

proven winners is one of the biggest ornamental plant companies in the united states, possibly the world. you might know them from their patented white flower pots. they’re centered in california (as, actually, a lot of these large flower producers are) and they manage a HUUUUUUGEEE network of giant industrial flower greenhouses. 

like, you have to understand, all garden retailers have to buy their shit from somewhere, and although the centers and local greenhouses selling proven winners stuff are often small and independent (unless ur talking like…flowerama or something), a large portion of the plants themselves, like many things in capitalism, form an industry of their own dominated by a handful of oligarch corporations, of which proven winners is one. small retailers order bulk products from these companies, should it be through full-color paper catalogs (which exist, btw, and are wild in and of themselves to look at; i actually have a few back home that i keep around solely bc they’re incredibly fascinating in a slightly offputting jurassic park kind of way), online, or through a sales representative for their region. 

it depends on what they’re ordering, but they can buy seeds, plugs (the black trays of like….tiny plants you buy at garden centers to put in planters? the ones that come in, like, six packs? those are called ‘plugs’), and in the case of perennials, woody plants of various ages, among other things. these plants are bred, marketed, and sold on a goddamn industrial scale. it’s wild. 

now….this is where it gets absolutely fascinating to me. this isn’t just proven winners, but proven winners is one of the top contenders of this. some highlights of how plants are actually marketed on an industrial scale: 

-plants come out in collections. like, you have horticulturalist designer people who put their names on some stuff and they all go out as like, The New Hot Thing™. 

-they always promote their top selling stuff, and the plants that won awards, and like, the most popular flower arrangements and stuff. this in and of itself, again, isn’t like…..bad, it just feels weird how plants are marketed as objects rather than living things, you know?

-these plants are 100% bred and optimized for their commercial value and how they look. see the above point about how it feels like they’re treating them as objects. 

-every year, there are new plants, which are put at the front of the catalogue and like, show them off as the Hit New Products. these are all part of the year’s collective collection, so like, proven winners has their 2019 collection all ready on their site in a special little tab: 

FUN INDUSTRY SIDE STORY: looks like they have some new orange petunias this year, which reminds me fondly of the 2017 purge ordered by the USDA of a ton of illegally GMO orange petunias….

you see, orange petunias don’t exist naturally, so what companies do is either 1. systematically breed orange into them, which can take years, or 2. take red petunias and just put in some coding for yellow from the maize genome, which makes them orange. usually, you have to submit all this paperwork and go through a ton of government red tape to sell GMOs, including required trials conducted by the federal government, but what some of these large ornamental seed companies were doing was just….not telling the government and just kind of…pretending that they bred them. so in 2017, a netherlands team noticed that these were like….kind of Suspicious™, and started doing some tests….and accidentally uncovered like, this huge international orange petunia scandal across all these companies, over 30 varieties of illegal petunia being sold internationally. they had to alert the actual EU, which then alerted the USDA, who then gave an actual government order for these large companies to literally burn, bury, or otherwise destroy all their industrial stock of the proven illegal GMO orange petunias. 

small retailers who had bought them assuming that they were legal were allowed to keep and continue selling what they bought, but the actual producers were ordered to just fucking. violently destroy everything. the USDA informed these companies that they could sell them again, but only if they were put through the proper government channels and received proper certification. i checked the old recall list and didn’t see these, so i’m assuming they’re like…Legit, but. im 👀 somebody test these lol

AAANNNNYYway that aside, if you would like to see the Proven Winners 2019 Flower Collection Showcase™, they have a bunch of……weird kind of ads on their youtube channel showing artsy pics of their new shit. to this day i can’t pin down exactly what about them makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, but you really do get a sense that they’re selling an object to preform, which i guess is the point, but…idk, it’s just a very different view of plants, i think, then i personally have. very sci-fi-y, if you will. all their ads are like this; these video are essentially very similar to what you get from their print sales booklets, but in video form.

see, last but not least, my biggest beef with proven winners is the weird way they handle their company. 

you get inspected by the plant police.

im not kidding. for those not very familiar with plant reproduction, you can grow vegetative clones of plants through a process called taking cuttings, where you cut off a part of the plant and put it in a new pot under the right conditions, and it develops a root system and becomes a genetic clone to the parent. obviously, anyone can do this with a lot of the proven winners plants, especially because PW plants, as i’ve noticed, tend to be bred to be more vigorous. 

proven winners wants to ensure that there’s no Illegal Plant Downloads taking place, so they literally like….send people out to these small retailers and ask to see their stock to make sure that all the plants are going in the Patented Proven Winners White Pots™ with the Patented Proven Winners Information Tags™. you MUST plant proven winners stuff in the pots they send you, with the instructions they send you, and they will check you for this. the first time my internship mentor ordered from them, they accidentally planted the plugs in generic brown pots instead of the white ones, and the weird proven winners police rolled in unannounced for an inspection and told them that the next time it happened they wouldn’t sell to them anymore. what they’re worried about happening is that the growers will order a small amount and then just make a bunch of cuttings without paying them, and it’s just……weird. like i get why they do it but that’s always struck me as really, really shady lmao

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Bill Gates will kill us all

2.5b people in Earth's 130 poorest countries have not been vaccinated. The 85 poorest countries won't be vaccinated until 2023. The humanitarian cost is unforgivable - and self-defeating, as each infected person is a potential source of new strains.

https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19-5-february-2021

How the actual fuck did this happen?

What happened to the early pledges by governments, the WHO, public health experts and leading research institutions to create global cooperation in vaccine development, eschewing patents and secrecy so that we could rescue our species?

That dream was smashed.

Many people helped create our vaccine apartheid, the single individual who did the most to get us here is Bill Gates, through his highly ideological "philanthropic" foundation, which exists to push his pitiless doctrine of unfettered monopoly.

It was Gates who sabotaged the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), replacing it with his failed ACT-Accelerator, a system of patents and secrecy and vast profits for the pharma industry, ornamented with nonbinding, failed promises of access for poor nations.

It was Gates who convinced Oxford to renege on its promise of patent-free access to its publicly funded vaccine research for the global south in favor of exclusive patent access for Astrazeneca.

https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/

When we hear ghoul sellouts like Howard Dean pushing the racist, genocidal lie that "patents don't matter" because brown people in poor countries can't make vaccines, we're hearing Gates's talking points:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream

Gates's role in vaccine apartheid is laid out in exquisite detail in Alexander Zaitchik's outstanding New Republic feature, which delves into Gates's longstanding project to sideline democratic governments and cooperation in favor of monopoly tyranny.

https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines

This goes way, way back. I mean, *waaaay* back, all the way to 1976, when Gates wrote his infamous "Open Letter to Hobbyists," decrying the dominant, cooperative mode of software development and calling its practitioners thieves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Gates's fortune depended on creating a software monopoly, and that monopoly required "intellectual property" protection. Gates has always been a monopolist, and so naturally, he loves IP (before "IP" was a common term, copyrights and patents were called "monopolies").

Intellectual property is a very important part of the inequality story, the story of how we got to a world where billions of people are denied vaccines and where all people face new, more virulent strains as a result.

As UNCTAD chief economist Richard Kozul-Wright told Lynn Fries for GPE: "[IP allows companies] to grab a larger share of what has already been produced in the economy."

It's a means of extracting rents, not for doing things, but for OWNING things.

IP is key to tax avoidance: companies like Ikea transfer "IP" (the Ikea trademark) to a numbered company in a tax haven; each national Ikea subsidiary pays "licensing fees" for the trademark equal to 100% of their in-country profits, so they never earn a (taxable) cent.

The transformation of the world into a monopolized system of IP-heavy, rent-extracting, tax-dodging companies really kicked into gear after 1999, with the signing of the WTO agreement and its IP adjunct, the TRIPPS, and as Zaitchik details, Gates was instrumental there.

For this part of the story, Zaitchik talks to Jamie Love, who was at the UN when NGOs like his were pushing to create vaccine and other pharma pools for the global south, while pharma companies handed out pamphlets bearing the Gates Foundation logo, smearing the plan.

Though the US delegation struggled for credibility, the combination of the Gates Foundation, and former US trade officials fronting for  the global pharma industry managed to sideline the project, which was being driven by the demand for equitable access to AIDS drugs.

With Gates's help, the WTO emerged as an IP enforcement powerhouse. Zaitchik cites Dylan Mohan Gray: "it took Washington 40 years to threaten apartheid South Africa with sanctions and less than four to threaten the post-apartheid Mandela government over AIDS drugs."

Incredibly, the Gates Foundation used this to burnish its humanitarian image: they solicited donations from pharma companies and used them to subsidize AIDS drugs in the global south, a maneuver that let them seem like philanthropists.

When in reality, they had overseen a program to systematically deny the world's poorest and most threatened people the right to make their own drugs, making them dependent on the whims of multinational corporate charity instead.

Sound familiar? Today, Gates runs around repeating the lie that poor people can't make their own medicine,  saying that patent exemptions won't make a difference now - to the extent he's right, the world *now* is the crucial one.

Having sabotaged the efforts by poor countries to engage in the kind of production ramp-up the rich world saw as vaccines were being developed, it may *now* be too late. "Because of my bad ideas *then*, it's too late *now*."

The connection between IP and elite philanthropy is deep and important. IP's rent-seeking and tax-dodging has made poor countries beholden to offshore monopolists in health, agriculture and IT, and then starved them of taxes to build up domestic alternatives.

This, in turn, makes them dependent on "gifts" from the billionaires who arm-twisted them into IP treaties, forced them to pay rent on all domestic production, and then profit-shifted the funds out of the reach of their tax-collectors.

As Anand Giridharadas reminded us in his seminal "Winners Take All," the core purpose of elite philanthropy has been the same since the robber-baron era: to burnish the reputations of monsters who take everything and give back crumbs.

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/10/winners-take-all-modern-philanthropy-means-that-giving-some-away-is-more-important-than-how-you-got-it/

Reading Jamie Love's quotes in Zaitchik's article reminded me of my own time working with Jamie and Knowledge Ecology International at WIPO in Geneva, when I was an NGO delegate to a global DRM treaty.

You see, at WIPO, the vast majority of NGOs aren't human rights organizations or other public interest groups - they're industry associations representing tech, entertainment, broadcast and pharma monopolists.

These guys - almost all guys - were just aghast when real NGOs started showing up for these meetings and were absolutely shameless in their sabotage of our efforts to balance their corporate lies (absolutely bald-faced lies were routinely entered into the debates).

How petty? Well, they had been accustomed to writing up "fact-sheets" for the day's debate and handing them off to WIPO staffers working for the secretariat, who would photocopy them and set them out on literature tables for the national delegates.

So we started doing this too: we'd take careful notes on the day's debates, convene with global experts to debunk industry association lies, get our Indymedia friends to translate them into six languages, and hand them off to the secretariat in the morning for copying.

So they got the secretariat - a former US textiles negotiator who made her bones helping create the conditions for slave labor in places like Bangladesh - to end the practice of photocopying papers for all NGOs.

Of course the industry bodies had cushy offices in Geneva, whereas we stayed in flophouses and youth hostels. They could ask their underlings to come in early and do their copying for them, whereas we had to take a bus to the all-night copy-shop to get our handouts copied.

Here's where it gets super-weird: our handouts started to go missing. We'd set out our stacks of paper on the literature tables before the morning session and an hour later, they'd all be gone, but none of the delegates had managed to get a copy.

We found those missing handouts...in the garbage, behind potted plants and in the *toilets*.

No, seriously.

And here's the kicker: during the ensuing furore, the main response from the pharma lobbyists was to object to us calling ourselves "public interest NGOs."

I'll never forget this smarmy sociopath in his expensive suit, with his shit-eating grin, standing there saying, "Phamaceuticals serve the public interest, and our industry association is a nonprofit. We are a non-profit, public-interest NGO."

It was a remarkable sight. 20 years later, their version of the public interest - the doctrine of Gates - has produced a multi-billion-person reservoir of the sick and vulnerable who are doomed to serve as factories for highly virulent variants.

This is a literally genocidal doctrine, and it threatens our very civilization. It's a funny kind of non-profit, public interest move for an industry and its billionaire ideologue funders to have made.

But hey, at least no one's "intellectual property" took a hit.

[thejokersenigma]

Christmas Fanfiction Advent Calendar 2017 - Day 3 - The BatFamily - Decorating the BatCave

This was just a silly little idea that popped into my head - again I’ve never written these characters before and I don’t know them brilliantly so i apologise if its a bit shit! haha Hope you enjoy anyway!

MASTERLIST

“Alfred.” Bruce Wayne called up to his elderly butler as he descended the last few steps into the Batcave, carrying a tray of food and coffee, “What is this?”

Alfred Pennyworth raised his gaze to the item in question as he walked smartly across the room, placing the tray down on the one small, available surface. He observed the end that hung in Bruce’s hand, the rest still draped where the man had found it around the large monitor of the BatComputer.

“That would be a fairy light, sir.” Alfred said in his characteristic bored tone.

“Yes,” Bruce couldn’t help but smirk slightly at the usefulness of his old friend, “But why is it here?”

“Well, you see, sir, it is traditional at this time of year to decorate ones home with such ornaments and –“

“Yes, Alfred, I know what Christmas is.” Bruce broke in before he was lectured. “But why is it down here?”

“I believe, Master Tim and Master Damian thought it would be nice.” Said Alfred pleasantly.

Bruce let out a heavy sigh. “We have an entire mansion upstairs for all this stuff.” Bruce grumbled, pulling at the irritating string of multi-coloured lights.

“I’ll inform the boys.” Said Alfred formally. “Anything else, sir?” He enquired.

Bruce shook his head. “No, Alfred, I just need you to cancel that Soiree tomorrow night, I have a feeling I’ll be busy.”

“Yes, sir, one bout of food poisoning coming right up.” He joked, those his face remained completely serious. Seeing no other items requiring his services, Alfred began to head back for the passageway leading up to the house above.

“Oh, and Alfred?”

“Hm?”

“Take these with you.” Bruce called, throwing the pile of lights up to elderly man who caught them deftly in one hand, barely batting an eyelid. He didn’t say another word as he departed.

 Later that evening the batmobile roared into the Batcave, it’s wheels screeching to a halt in it’s designated spot. Batman his arm swung across his stomach to hold a broken rib, jumped out, followed shortly by a rather battered looking Robin.

Alfred entered the batcave from his usual entrance as Batman limped his way up to the batcomputer, flinching slightly with each step. “Rough night, sir?” Alfred asked pleasantly like he was enquiring about the weather outside. Bruce just grimaced in answer.

“Turns out Ivy, Harley and Selina are back together again.” Explained Tim, pulling off his mask as he dragged himself up behind Bruce. He glanced down at this arm and clutched at it where the sleeve had been torn by either a stray cat claw or thorny man eating plant.

“Wonderful.” Said Alfred dryly.

Bruce had now reached the top level of the cavern’s many floors, but stopped in his path to the computer, taking in the scene before him. “What is this?” He asked, annoyance clear in his tone.

Neither Tim or Alfred answered as Bruce strode over to the large computer system. Not only had the fairy lights been replaced, but now the other, smaller screens, that surrounded the main monitor, were decked with tinsel that reflected the dim industrial lighting above them.

Bruce pulled at a piece of gold tinsel and it easily fell off, now dangling in his hand. He immediately turned on Tim who threw his arms up in surrender. “It wasn’t me, honestly!” He swore, eyes wide in panic.

Bruce frowned, unconvinced, and then his eyes moved to Alfred who didn’t flinch or change expression. “Get me the other boys.” He stated darkly, turning back to the computer.

“I’m afraid I can’t, sir. They all appear to be out.” Alfred informed him.

“All of them?” Bruce clarified, turning back to the butler in surprise.

“It would seem so.”

Bruce grumbled something to himself, bundling up the tinsel and pitching it over the edge of the railing closest to him so it fell into the dark watery depths of the cavern below. He then did the same to the rest of the tinsel, scowling the whole time whilst Tim and Alfred watched.

Bruce removed the fairy lights once more and turned to the two others with him. “These.” He said, holding aloft the string of lights at Tim, “Fling them around the house as much as you want – but they are banned from down here.” He tossed them over to the boy who reflectively caught them, giving Bruce a single obedient nod, though his eyes were still wary. He hurried off them – as much as his injuries would let him – to change and tend to his wounds.

Alfred watched this and caught Bruce’s eye as he turned back to the monitor, giving him a raised eyebrow that Bruce shook off, turning his attention instead on some much-needed surveillance monitoring.

 Despite Bruce’s protests and threats, the decorations continued to appear in the batcave. He had attempted to catch the culprits red handed with the cameras within the cave, but clearly someone knew how to hack into the system as the footage went dead at intervals, and, when it returned, a new decoration would be in place.

He had a feeling Alfred might be aiding and abetting them.

First it was the strand of lights again, then the tinsel – the offenders having bought more – which Bruce found draped around the capsules containing the batman and robin uniforms, then paper chains appeared hanging from the sides of the cave and weaving back and forth across the space above him.

The most recent addition had been baubles that had been hung on any available ‘hook’ that could be found around the cave.

Bruce sighed heavily as he made his way down to the cave that afternoon. It almost had become entertaining for him to see what new things had popped up, but he made sure to maintain a dark scowl throughout – no need to encourage them.

Of course, every time he found it decorated he made sure to remove everything – either bringing it back up to the house, or just binning it. Yet they always came back, and always with an extra decoration on top of them.

As he descended the secret passageway from the mansion the cave, he caught a pungent, warming scent of orange and cinnamon and thought he could a low murmuring as he took one of the turns in the long staircase. Was he going to catch them in the act this time?

But as he got closer Bruce realised it wasn’t people, but music playing out from the cave. Christmas music.

He strode with a frown into the cavern to find the batcomputer cheerfully singing out classic Christmas tunes, and the scent – even stronger now – appeared to be coming from the wreaths that hung either side of the entrance way to the stairs.

But that wasn’t all this time – the boys had gone all out and somehow managed to erect a large Christmas tree on, sat to the right-hand side, fully lit and decorated - even with fake presents sat beneath the bottom branches.

Bruce paused for a moment to take it all in before his usual annoyed scowl returned. He’d have to ignore it for now, he had too much work he needed to do – he’d deal with it later.

When he sat down at the computer, however, he did attempt to turn off the music that continued to play in loop, but the media system appeared to have been hacked and to reroute it would take a him quite a while.

He frowned at the screen in annoyance. He’d have to try and ignored that too apparently.

So, Bruce tried to make do with the situation and work around the decorations. It wasn’t too difficult, the smell was comforting, the tree was relatively out of the way and the music was almost relaxing. He only had to flick tinsel off the screen a few times.

It was a few hours later before he heard the large metal hanger door of the batcave open. He ignored it, too buried in his work, as he attempted to track an escapee’s footprints across Gotham.

“Jeez Bruce, never realised you loved Christmas this.” Joked Dick Grayson a few moments later as he took in the surroundings, still dressed in his Nightwing costume.

“Funny.” Was all Bruce said.

“Honestly. I thought the Joker had broken in.” Dick said, “Is – is that… Christmas music?” He asked, looking at the batcomputer monitor with a raised eyebrow, smirking in disbelief.

“Someone’s bugged the computer. I don’t have time to fix it right now.” Bruce explained briskly.

“Sure…” Dick muttered with a grin.

When Bruce didn’t show any signs of being more social, Dick left him to it, moving off towards the mansion to scavenge some food from Alfred. He stopped in the doorway, “Ya’ know, if you just let them have the lights in the first place it wouldn’t have gone this far.”

Bruce ignored him, and Dick couldn’t help but grin at the aging man’s back before he darted up the stairs to the house.

Bruce never bothered to take anything down.

[iron-sulfur-world]

@growitbackjosh

about what you tagged me in, what first comes to mind is human’s deliberate fire setting

one of the first farming techniques was slash-and-burn, which cuts down as much plant matter in an area as possible, and then lights it up, which destroys the rest, and leaves nice ash and soil for agriculturally significant plants to grow without competition from native plants. areas cleared via slash-and-burn are called swiddens, which is a fun word.

so this can go into alien admiration of human ingenuity, and risk taking (risk of fire going out of control vs reward of growing desirable plants). especially because this technique is literally ancient and continues to modern day, although somewhat safer. like, ‘ok, we need this much land clear for crops, get your shovels everyone, lets uproot all these plants,’ and the human takes a lighter and says, nah, this is easier’ and they’re right.

something else that we can look at is the comparison between earth and non-earth planets. first is we don’t know how common wild fires would be, so theoretically they’re exceedingly rare, only occurring at volcanos and such, especially if the planet doesn’t have any lightning-producing weather. fire could theoretically only occur on a small scale, for cooking and industrial applications. with that is the shock of seeing fire so goddamn big. like, it’d shock a lot of humans to be near a big fire, but we at least have a concept that ah, big fires exist.

so taking the ‘humans are space australians’ a little more literal, eucalyptus trees, because of the oils produced, are extremely flammable to the point that they give off flammable vapors in heat and have been recorded to explode during forest fires. ornamental eucalyptus trees out of australia (notably in california) are a serious fire hazard for starting and/or worsening forest fires with other species of tree

so knowing how flammable trees already are, like, what if aliens just don’t have a concept of plants being flammable. like, organisms are all kinda fleshy and wet, so if they burn, they burn like meat burns, and not like, oh shit, its going up in flames. so earth, compared to other home planets, is unnecessarily flammable for no goddamn reason and humans set fires anyway

thats probably bad for the aliens on the ship discovering that most humans have at least a little pyromania

[botanyshitposts]

how did you know you wanted to be a botanist? did you ever consider doing something else?

(I’m going to write this one with proper capitalization because this is gonna be long and it’s easier to read)

Ohhh yeah. Like, to be honest, if I could do ANYTHING with my life I’d probably teach people about plants, write science fiction, or teach about plants through writing science fiction. I feel a lot like a journalist walking through botany conventions and stuff, like I just want to survey everything and learn it all and talk about it, and I’m not sure if I would be good at being like, a Real Plant Scientist, despite having some VERY niche botanical interests that i would absolutely dig deep and go through the literature for (isoetes and isoetes evolution, maize, lichens, carnivorous plants of the very specific nepenthes genus, hornworts, thermogenesis, etc, if you’ve been following this blog for a while you’ve probably seen me Go Off about a ton more). I do consider myself to be an aspiring botanist, but not a researcher looking to produce data and publish. That being said, going into academia isn’t completely out of the realm of possibilities for me.

Right now, I kind of have the pipe dream of trying for a science communication grad program, or a science fiction writing program. As it stands, I’m a biology major with a plant science concentration, I’m going into my junior year of undergrad, and i’m going to declare an english minor this year. I’ve been writing sci-fi since i was 10, and I’m currently in the process of buckling down to try to get something published (on a small scale to start) and increasing my stamina to work on some substantial projects, be it fiction or nonfiction or both. If I want to take writing seriously, I figure I have to start working hard for it now. 

As for like, HOW I got into botany, it’s been a while since I’ve talked about this on here, so I should start by answering a frequent question I get: most botanists stumble into botany. Like, they go down a path with animals or ecology or another biological field, and then accidentally fall in love with them. Not everybody is like, down for botany right in undergrad. Actually, a lot of people don’t think plants are very cool in undergrad. I started learning at 15, and I get asks sometimes that are like ‘I’m 17, am I too old to get into botany?’ like dude RARELY do you see botanists younger than 20 lmao you are NEVER too old for that shit. Plants have the disadvantage of being static beings in the peripheral of our everyday lives until you start paying attention to them (a phenomenon colloquially referred to as ‘plant blindness’ in the botany/horticulture communities), so they tend to get sidelined in K-12 education and are easily overlooked in general. 

I got into botany through an unpaid high school internship program. Fun fact, before all this I was passively thinking about becoming a zoologist, and what a disaster that would have been. I signed up to help out in a local greenhouse and was immediately blasted by how fucked up ornamental plants are. Specifically, I remember a time when my mentor was like, ‘do you want to see what $1,000 worth of plants looks like?’ and of COURSE I wanted to, so he brought me down to the back of the greenhouse. $1,000 worth of seeds turned out to be about 10-15 test tubes and blank white packets in a tupperware container. He took one of the test tubes out; it was filled with bulky, lumpy looking tan seeds. He said each one grew a pot of three different types of lettuce. They were bulky because each one was three separate seeds fused together with a rubbery substance that companies apply to make the seeds easier for robotic potting arms to pick up. It’s wild shit. I was a big fan of Jurassic Park at the time. As you can imagine, my third eye had been absolutely blasted open and I’ve never been the same.

From there I started volunteering in a community greenhouse, then I got obsessed with plants that heat up (thermogenic plants) and ended up teaching myself a ton off of wikipedia and from anything that wasn’t behind a paywall to understand what the hell I was reading about, then got some money from an extended learning program at my school to do a research project with it, and then my extended learning teacher had me submit my research to a science competition, and after that I got chosen to give a presentation at said competition and to be completely honest I completely blacked out for 15 minutes and can only remember crying on stage at the end about how much I loved Eastern Skunk Cabbages (my subject for the project), and THEN I went onto the National competition in San Diego and THAT was wild because in retrospect WOW my project sucked data and hypothesis-wise, and THEN I spent a summer doing manual labor for an industrial maize breeding facility which was wild, and after that I went to college and got invested in lichens and isoetes and all that wild shit and that’s where I am now. Last summer I went to the BSA conference in Manchester and the ICPS conference in California, both of which I liveblogged on here. They were awesome. Like holy shit. 

As for the history of this blog: I started this blog when I was...god, 15 or 16 I think, when I first was going hog wild getting obsessed with plant stuff I absorbed off the internet. My parents and friends got very tired of my infodumping very fast. I’d been a tumblr user for a couple years already, so I made this blog to talk about stuff so I wouldn’t annoy people irl, and now it’s turned into like, wow. This(tm). Which is wild. 

I get a lot of questions too about like, jobs in botany, and how to get further in botany, and I never really know how to answer them because I’m still figuring it out myself. My number one biggest source of botany information, to be completely honest, is asking people, and talking to people in horticulture and botany positions and bugging them with questions (I first learned about isoetes while talking to a couple grad students around a campfire on a BSA fern foray. One was wearing an isoetes convention hat, and they were all kind of struggling to explain them to me when I asked, which of course got me obsessed immediately because when a plant in general is difficult to explain you know it’s some cursed shit. It then took me a semester of college to begin to understand them, and yes, they are just That Cursed and also INCREDIBLY underrepresented and understudied in the literature). 

Idk how to end this but yeah thank you guys for asking me questions and supporting my shitposts and stuff all these years. It’s made me a better science communicator than I could have ever imagined it would make me, and I’m still learning a ton from it. I’m moving back to college tomorrow. I will finish this post with a picture of a hornwort (anthocerotophyta), the slimiest of the cursed lads: 

[botanyshitposts]

whats the deal with proven winners?

okay. so. this is actually how i got into botany in the first place; i got an unpaid internship at a greenhouse in high school and realized, very quickly, that we live in a jurassic park hellscape where big companies breed plants solely for their looks and performance, and i found that so fucking weird that i couldnt get enough of it and fell down the rabbit hole. i don’t find them bad per say; i find them weird and how they manage their product in terms of policing their retailers is very sketchy to me, but they’re not like, monstanto-level off the shits (yet). with mother’s day next weekend we’re coming up on one of the biggest greenhouse/ornamental plant industry sales days of the year, next to valentines’ day (which favors the rose industry especially), so this is an exceptionally convenient time to talk about this. 

proven winners is one of the biggest ornamental plant companies in the united states, possibly the world. you might know them from their patented white flower pots. they’re centered in california (as, actually, a lot of these large flower producers are) and they manage a HUUUUUUGEEE network of giant industrial flower greenhouses. 

like, you have to understand, all garden retailers have to buy their shit from somewhere, and although the centers and local greenhouses selling proven winners stuff are often small and independent (unless ur talking like...flowerama or something), a large portion of the plants themselves, like many things in capitalism, form an industry of their own dominated by a handful of oligarch corporations, of which proven winners is one. small retailers order bulk products from these companies, should it be through full-color paper catalogs (which exist, btw, and are wild in and of themselves to look at; i actually have a few back home that i keep around solely bc they’re incredibly fascinating in a slightly offputting jurassic park kind of way), online, or through a sales representative for their region. 

it depends on what they’re ordering, but they can buy seeds, plugs (the black trays of like....tiny plants you buy at garden centers to put in planters? the ones that come in, like, six packs? those are called ‘plugs’), and in the case of perennials, woody plants of various ages, among other things. these plants are bred, marketed, and sold on a goddamn industrial scale. it’s wild. 

now....this is where it gets absolutely fascinating to me. this isn’t just proven winners, but proven winners is one of the top contenders of this. some highlights of how plants are actually marketed on an industrial scale: 

-plants come out in collections. like, you have horticulturalist designer people who put their names on some stuff and they all go out as like, The New Hot Thing(tm). 

-they always promote their top selling stuff, and the plants that won awards, and like, the most popular flower arrangements and stuff. this in and of itself, again, isn’t like.....bad, it just feels weird how plants are marketed as objects rather than living things, you know?

-these plants are 100% bred and optimized for their commercial value and how they look. see the above point about how it feels like they’re treating them as objects. 

-every year, there are new plants, which are put at the front of the catalogue and like, show them off as the Hit New Products. these are all part of the year’s collective collection, so like, proven winners has their 2019 collection all ready on their site in a special little tab: 

FUN INDUSTRY SIDE STORY: looks like they have some new orange petunias this year, which reminds me fondly of the 2017 purge ordered by the USDA of a ton of illegally GMO orange petunias....

you see, orange petunias don’t exist naturally, so what companies do is either 1. systematically breed orange into them, which can take years, or 2. take red petunias and just put in some coding for yellow from the maize genome, which makes them orange. usually, you have to submit all this paperwork and go through a ton of government red tape to sell GMOs, including required trials conducted by the federal government, but what some of these large ornamental seed companies were doing was just....not telling the government and just kind of...pretending that they bred them. so in 2017, a netherlands team noticed that these were like....kind of Suspicious(tm), and started doing some tests....and accidentally uncovered like, this huge international orange petunia scandal across all these companies, over 30 varieties of illegal petunia being sold internationally. they had to alert the actual EU, which then alerted the USDA, who then gave an actual government order for these large companies to literally burn, bury, or otherwise destroy all their industrial stock of the proven illegal GMO orange petunias. 

small retailers who had bought them assuming that they were legal were allowed to keep and continue selling what they bought, but the actual producers were ordered to just fucking. violently destroy everything. the USDA informed these companies that they could sell them again, but only if they were put through the proper government channels and received proper certification. i checked the old recall list and didn’t see these, so i’m assuming they’re like...Legit, but. im 👀 somebody test these lol

AAANNNNYYway that aside, if you would like to see the Proven Winners 2019 Flower Collection Showcase(tm), they have a bunch of......weird kind of ads on their youtube channel showing artsy pics of their new shit. to this day i can’t pin down exactly what about them makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, but you really do get a sense that they’re selling an object to preform, which i guess is the point, but...idk, it’s just a very different view of plants, i think, then i personally have. very sci-fi-y, if you will. all their ads are like this; these video are essentially very similar to what you get from their print sales booklets, but in video form.

see, last but not least, my biggest beef with proven winners is the weird way they handle their company. 

you get inspected by the plant police.

im not kidding. for those not very familiar with plant reproduction, you can grow vegetative clones of plants through a process called taking cuttings, where you cut off a part of the plant and put it in a new pot under the right conditions, and it develops a root system and becomes a genetic clone to the parent. obviously, anyone can do this with a lot of the proven winners plants, especially because PW plants, as i’ve noticed, tend to be bred to be more vigorous. 

proven winners wants to ensure that there’s no Illegal Plant Downloads taking place, so they literally like....send people out to these small retailers and ask to see their stock to make sure that all the plants are going in the Patented Proven Winners White Pots(tm) with the Patented Proven Winners Information Tags(tm). you MUST plant proven winners stuff in the pots they send you, with the instructions they send you, and they will check you for this. the first time my internship mentor ordered from them, they accidentally planted the plugs in generic brown pots instead of the white ones, and the weird proven winners police rolled in unannounced for an inspection and told them that the next time it happened they wouldn’t sell to them anymore. what they’re worried about happening is that the growers will order a small amount and then just make a bunch of cuttings without paying them, and it’s just......weird. like i get why they do it but that’s always struck me as really, really shady lmao

[mellimagicsblog]

"Illegal plant downloads" may be the funniest damn thing I've read all month. Thank you.

And yeah, it is weird to think of living things like objects. Still not as shady as breeding pets can be since culling plants is at least painless (somehow I still felt bad for all the orange petunias), but it's odd to describe living things as PRODUCTS, even if they aren't sentient.

I ain't religious in a traditional sense, and one of my first gigs was cross-breeding watermelons so I certainly don't mind breeding plants (it's quite fascinating to me!) but I think there is something wrong about humans trademarking life itself.

whats the deal with proven winners?

okay. so. this is actually how i got into botany in the first place; i got an unpaid internship at a greenhouse in high school and realized, very quickly, that we live in a jurassic park hellscape where big companies breed plants solely for their looks and performance, and i found that so fucking weird that i couldnt get enough of it and fell down the rabbit hole. i don’t find them bad per say; i find them weird and how they manage their product in terms of policing their retailers is very sketchy to me, but they’re not like, monstanto-level off the shits (yet). with mother’s day next weekend we’re coming up on one of the biggest greenhouse/ornamental plant industry sales days of the year, next to valentines’ day (which favors the rose industry especially), so this is an exceptionally convenient time to talk about this. 

proven winners is one of the biggest ornamental plant companies in the united states, possibly the world. you might know them from their patented white flower pots. they’re centered in california (as, actually, a lot of these large flower producers are) and they manage a HUUUUUUGEEE network of giant industrial flower greenhouses. 

like, you have to understand, all garden retailers have to buy their shit from somewhere, and although the centers and local greenhouses selling proven winners stuff are often small and independent (unless ur talking like…flowerama or something), a large portion of the plants themselves, like many things in capitalism, form an industry of their own dominated by a handful of oligarch corporations, of which proven winners is one. small retailers order bulk products from these companies, should it be through full-color paper catalogs (which exist, btw, and are wild in and of themselves to look at; i actually have a few back home that i keep around solely bc they’re incredibly fascinating in a slightly offputting jurassic park kind of way), online, or through a sales representative for their region. 

it depends on what they’re ordering, but they can buy seeds, plugs (the black trays of like….tiny plants you buy at garden centers to put in planters? the ones that come in, like, six packs? those are called ‘plugs’), and in the case of perennials, woody plants of various ages, among other things. these plants are bred, marketed, and sold on a goddamn industrial scale. it’s wild. 

now….this is where it gets absolutely fascinating to me. this isn’t just proven winners, but proven winners is one of the top contenders of this. some highlights of how plants are actually marketed on an industrial scale: 

-plants come out in collections. like, you have horticulturalist designer people who put their names on some stuff and they all go out as like, The New Hot Thing™. 

-they always promote their top selling stuff, and the plants that won awards, and like, the most popular flower arrangements and stuff. this in and of itself, again, isn’t like…..bad, it just feels weird how plants are marketed as objects rather than living things, you know?

-these plants are 100% bred and optimized for their commercial value and how they look. see the above point about how it feels like they’re treating them as objects. 

-every year, there are new plants, which are put at the front of the catalogue and like, show them off as the Hit New Products. these are all part of the year’s collective collection, so like, proven winners has their 2019 collection all ready on their site in a special little tab: 

FUN INDUSTRY SIDE STORY: looks like they have some new orange petunias this year, which reminds me fondly of the 2017 purge ordered by the USDA of a ton of illegally GMO orange petunias….

you see, orange petunias don’t exist naturally, so what companies do is either 1. systematically breed orange into them, which can take years, or 2. take red petunias and just put in some coding for yellow from the maize genome, which makes them orange. usually, you have to submit all this paperwork and go through a ton of government red tape to sell GMOs, including required trials conducted by the federal government, but what some of these large ornamental seed companies were doing was just….not telling the government and just kind of…pretending that they bred them. so in 2017, a netherlands team noticed that these were like….kind of Suspicious™, and started doing some tests….and accidentally uncovered like, this huge international orange petunia scandal across all these companies, over 30 varieties of illegal petunia being sold internationally. they had to alert the actual EU, which then alerted the USDA, who then gave an actual government order for these large companies to literally burn, bury, or otherwise destroy all their industrial stock of the proven illegal GMO orange petunias. 

small retailers who had bought them assuming that they were legal were allowed to keep and continue selling what they bought, but the actual producers were ordered to just fucking. violently destroy everything. the USDA informed these companies that they could sell them again, but only if they were put through the proper government channels and received proper certification. i checked the old recall list and didn’t see these, so i’m assuming they’re like…Legit, but. im 👀 somebody test these lol

AAANNNNYYway that aside, if you would like to see the Proven Winners 2019 Flower Collection Showcase™, they have a bunch of……weird kind of ads on their youtube channel showing artsy pics of their new shit. to this day i can’t pin down exactly what about them makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, but you really do get a sense that they’re selling an object to preform, which i guess is the point, but…idk, it’s just a very different view of plants, i think, then i personally have. very sci-fi-y, if you will. all their ads are like this; these video are essentially very similar to what you get from their print sales booklets, but in video form.

see, last but not least, my biggest beef with proven winners is the weird way they handle their company. 

you get inspected by the plant police.

im not kidding. for those not very familiar with plant reproduction, you can grow vegetative clones of plants through a process called taking cuttings, where you cut off a part of the plant and put it in a new pot under the right conditions, and it develops a root system and becomes a genetic clone to the parent. obviously, anyone can do this with a lot of the proven winners plants, especially because PW plants, as i’ve noticed, tend to be bred to be more vigorous. 

proven winners wants to ensure that there’s no Illegal Plant Downloads taking place, so they literally like….send people out to these small retailers and ask to see their stock to make sure that all the plants are going in the Patented Proven Winners White Pots™ with the Patented Proven Winners Information Tags™. you MUST plant proven winners stuff in the pots they send you, with the instructions they send you, and they will check you for this. the first time my internship mentor ordered from them, they accidentally planted the plugs in generic brown pots instead of the white ones, and the weird proven winners police rolled in unannounced for an inspection and told them that the next time it happened they wouldn’t sell to them anymore. what they’re worried about happening is that the growers will order a small amount and then just make a bunch of cuttings without paying them, and it’s just……weird. like i get why they do it but that’s always struck me as really, really shady lmao