A plant-scam warning
Hi, guys!
Happy holiday weekend! I hope you’re relaxing and enjoying your gardens.
If you’ve been on social media these past few months or even shopped online for plants, you might have seen some wild new options, like tie-dyed roses, unnaturally colored hostas or plants with neon, kaleidoscope foliage. These are, alas, AI-generated photos intended to scam you out of your money, your dreams and your faith in humanity.
Most of the website descriptions don’t mention the plant names or varieties, and if you spend a bit of time reading the reviews, they’re either glowing (and phony) or recount woeful tales of no-show orders, empty packages or seeds that never sprouted.
What’s worse is that some of these plants are offered for sale on mainstream websites like Amazon and Walmart.com, so there’s an air of legitimacy to them. But, with few exceptions, many products offered by third-party sellers there don’t have to pass muster with the retailers, which serve only as middlemen.
So, just a heads-up. If you see a wacky plant, Google around to confirm it exists before ordering it. And if you spot these bogus plants for sale on a megasite, report the fraud; there’s usually a “report something suspicious” link on the customer service page.
📬 Ask Jessica
DEAR JESSICA: My friend gave me bunches of a perennial plant that was gifted to her years ago, but we don’t know what it’s called. I planted some in the front garden and some in my backyard. The weird thing is the ones in the front blossomed with white flowers, and the ones in the back bloomed purple. I believe they were all from the same batch and was wondering if you knew what kind of flowers they are and if the bloom color is pH-dependent, as is the case with bigleaf hydrangeas. —Terri Donahue, Center Moriches, New York
DEAR TERRI: That’s Tradescantia, which is commonly called spiderwort. It’s a perennial and is hardy in zones 3 or 4 through 9. It can grow to 2 or 3 feet tall and has 1- to 2-inch-wide flowers that last a day each, opening only in the morning. The plant typically thrives in both sun and shade and is not particular about soil type.
While pH can affect the brightness or paleness of the leaves of certain varieties, such as its cousin, the tropical houseplant ‘wandering dude,’ it does not alter flower color, as it does with hydrangeas.
You have two different species there. The purple is either Tradescantia virginiana or ohiensis. The white one is Tradescantia x andersoniana ‘Osprey’, which is an interspecific hybrid.
Got a gardening question? Ask it here.
👏 Sunday shoutout
“My daylilies are in full bloom, and I have a lot of them, as I know many do,” writes Alan Quackenbush of Sayville, New York.
Send in your photo, and you could be featured next (bonus points if you’re in the picture!)
💡 If you do one thing this week…
If your lawn needs to be fertilized, now is the time to do it.
📰This week in my Associated Press gardening column
I write a weekly gardening column for the AP, so you might have seen my byline in your local paper (or news website) — wherever in the world you happen to be. In case you miss it, I’ll post the most recent here every week.
THIS WEEK: Creative tips for making the most of a small garden
LAST WEEK: Want your garden to smell as good as it looks? These flowers can do the job
BEFORE THAT: Weeds aren’t just nuisances, they’re messengers. Here’s what they can tell you
ONE MORE: Want to grow your own rice? A step-by-step guide for adventurous gardeners
You can read all my AP gardening columns here.
📚📺🎵 Random things I enjoyed this week
🥳 My girls threw me a surprise birthday brunch last Sunday at a local restaurant with 10 of my closest friends. It was lovely!
🎆 I had two cousins and the kids over for a BBQ on the 4th, after which we watched Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. It was beautiful to watch, like all his movies, and hard to follow, like all his movies.
📺 I streamed the entirety of both Supacell and Squid Game season 3 on Netflix this week. Supacell is a British series about random, unrelated people across London who suddenly develop superpowers. Squid Game is a South Korean dystopian thriller about a group of strangers lured to a secret island to play children’s games for millions of dollars, only to be caught in a kill-or-be-killed nightmare. Loved them both!
🤕 And I got some R&R yesterday after gashing my hand open on a super-sharp chef’s knife. I can now confirm it’s a top-quality knife, is all I can say. I had never needed stitches before, but I was grateful for the medical advancement that is “glue stitches.”
Let’s be friends! Follow me:
@JesDamiano on Instagram
@jessicadamiano on Facebook
@jesdamiano on Threads
📧 How’m I doing?
I welcome your comments and suggestions, so please send them along — as well as any topics you’d like to see covered and questions you’d like answered in the Ask Jessica section.