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Hi!

what's with this stupid craze for spray painted heathers? i've never seen them before but everywhere i go...they're there!

i mean WHY!!!!???? WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU SPRAY PAINT THEM????

no one believes me when i tell them! this lady was about to buy one at morrisons today and i told them and they didn't believe me. till i picked up the sign and showed them...and they were shocked! and i know they die after the first season and the colour washes off like.....after the first watering most of the time.

heathers are beautiful plants. one of my favourites...and there's such a huge variety for them....i don't see why garden centres have to "con" people into buying modified crap!

i've been to 2 garden centres already where they weren't labeled as painted heathers and when i asked the staff...they appeared to know nothing about it!

 :-\

Yup.Got it in one...stupid craze!!!

;)

ugh! they just had them in tescos aswell. i just wish i had a bucket of water i could throw over them and wash all the paint off. see if people buy them with paint dripping off them.

It's almost as bad as cacti with dried flowers stuck on them.

these are the same people who will be buying pumpkins for holloween ( american holiday )

- yes crazy

And what about at Christmas, those little teeny conifers than are dunked in glue then covered in glitter! :'(

Quote from: Robert_Brenchley on September 20, 2006, 22:14:34
It's almost as bad as cacti with dried flowers stuck on them.

I saw some of these on Sunday - you could even see where real flowers had been. Someone who had been looking at them didn't realise the paper flowers were fake until I told them. Sheer vandalism.

Saw painted heathers last year. Grrrrrr

yea! fake flowers! the co-op garden centre was selling bird of paradise with fake flowers! i could tell they were fake so i went over and started bending the foliage...only to realise that THAT part was real....but the whoe flower and it's stem were fake.

madness!!!

Quote from: cambourne7 on September 20, 2006, 22:20:12
these are the same people who will be buying pumpkins for holloween ( american holiday )

- yes crazy

I don't approve of the painted heathers or indeed of glittered plants of any kind - poinsettas get this treatment in the USA.  However, I don't really think the comment that the kind of people who would buy painted heathers are the same as those buying pumpkins for Halloween - I always buy a pumpkin to carve and have great fun doing so.  Halloween is more 'celebrated' in the US but I remember growing up in Scotland where we all got dressed up and went 'guising' and performed a song, did a dance or recited poetry in return for some peanuts, sweets and a tangerine.  A pumpkin is used for much more than just Halloween celebrations and you are unfair to judge people in that way.

Of course you don't have to go to all that trouble of messing about and carving your own.  Asda has plastic preformed with a face pumpkins which can be used to bung up landfill sites in a couple of weeks.

Froglets AKA grumpy old woman.

Can't think of anything more tacky!!!  I love carving my pumpkins!

Wonder if they melt and give of toxic gasses if you try & put a candle inside   :-\

Hopefully so - that would stop folks buying them again!

Going to try making pumpkin pie with the spare flesh from this year's pumpkin.  Just wish mine had grown big enough to carve!  Will try planting them earlier next year!

It is sad what garden centres and shops do to plants to sell them. But people buy them more for house ornaments then for the garden me thinks and if they sell the shops will sell. I pity the new gardeners who think they are getting a flower to find out its a fake.

The garden centre near my home has the coloured heathers, when I saw them I stopped dead in my tracks. You can never account for peoples tastes.

Nothing new under the sun, they say... I'm sure loads of peeps here remember the fad for blue chrysanths (stick white ones in blue-dyed water till the colour seeps into the petals). Yeuch!