I decided to get some house plants recently. I got a few cute Pokemon planters from Etsy and wanted some plants to put in them. I decided to go with cacti and succulents since they are supposed to be difficult to kill.

I bought two cacti at Home Depot earlier this week. When I got home and went to re-pot them, I found that one of them was already dead. The Copper King cactus I bought barely  had any roots attached and upon closer inspection, was hollow inside. I’m not sure the employees there ever actually water the plants.

I also realized that the flowers on each of the cacti were fake and glued on. Apparently this is a common practice at big box stores like Home Depot, Lowes, and Walmart. They glue dyed straw flowers to cacti to attract buyers, since people like colorful things. They are taking advantage of people who don’t know a lot about plants. Having random things glued on can’t be very good for the plant either. It’s like if a pet store were to glue a wig onto a dog to make it look fluffier.

I ended up returning the dead cactus and removing the fake flower from the living one. I should have thought to look closer at the plants before I bought them, especially after seeing some other plants in the store that were painted odd and unnatural colors. It just never occurred to me that a well-known store like that would do something so underhanded. Lesson learned. From now on, I will be buying all of my plants from local nurseries.

Here’s the dead Copper King. After researching online, I found that it’s supposed to be green in the middle with coppery brown spines. This one is brownish all the way through. While looking closely through the spines, I noticed a few holes in the body. It was hollow! Also notice the glue under the straw flower.

Here’s the Angel Wing cactus with the fake flower, and then without. After just a little bit of research on these cacti, it is pretty obvious that it’s a fake flower. I managed to get it off with minimal damage by heating up a knife and carefully cutting at the glue. The final bits of glue on the top of the cactus came right off as I pulled on the last bit of glue holding the flower on after cutting through most of the glue. Ignore the R2-D2 measuring cups in the background. Actually, don’t ignore them. They’re awesome!

Have you ever seen an Oddish with a cactus on his head? A leafy plant would have made more sense, but cacti are awesome!