Is your garden being taken over by FRANKEN FLOWERS
If you’ve got orange petunias, it almost certainly is — and it’s proof of a disturbing GM invasion by stealth
Beauty is beguiling, and what could be more delightful than a garden lined with bright orange petunias? Whatever the horticulture snobs may say, they are one of our most popular plants.
and they have such pretty, evocative names: african Sunset, Pegasus Orange Morn, Potunia Plus Papaya, Bonnie Orange, Sanguna Patio Salmon . . .
But petunias are not naturally orange and, when these varieties first appeared on the market two years ago, they were a suburban border sensation. Such a change from staid old purple and blue.
Legions of Britons snapped them up for their beds, hanging baskets and patios and, just a few months ago, experts hailed them ‘the fashionable colour for 2017’.
But now we know something sinister lurks in those glowing petals. these are illegal ‘Franken-flowers’, genetically modified with DNa taken from maize plants to create their unnatural orange hue. they should never have been introduced here, but somehow evaded Britain’s bio border defences.
this lack of oversight means there isn’t even an estimate of how many orange petunias are in the uK, or where they are.
and no one can say for certain what other GM plants are lurking in our gardens.
It is tempting just to shrug and say: ‘Oh well, they’re only flowers.’ But the story emerging this week of how scientifically altered plants have infiltrated our shores should sound loud alarm bells — for some experts are warning that the bedding plants may harbour threats, as yet unknown, to crops and pollinating insects such as bees and butterflies.
Genetically modified (GM) orange petunia seeds and plants first featured in British catalogues early in 2015. apparently, the products were sourced from the Continent.
But Defra — the Department for environment, Food and Rural affairs — took action only this month, when it issued an edict telling sellers of suspected GM petunias to stop selling them.
It wasn’t even Defra that had spotted something unusual about the plants. We have the Finns to thank for their diligence. Last month, the Finnish safety body evira banned the plants’ sale in Finland and warned eu authorities, who passed this on to Defra.
DRaNNIKKI Welling, a senior botany researcher at evira, told the Mail the agency was contacted by an agriculture expert at Helsinki university who had seen the plants on sale and remembered that, in the early days of GM, scientists had tried to turn petunias orange without real success.
He warned evira that the new plants must have been developed using more sophisticated forms of genetic modification. ‘By March, our analysis showed that the plants featured many elements of genetic modification,’ says Dr Welling.
Defra says it ‘regularly audits’ imports of seeds. If anything suspicious is noted, the seeds can be subjected to DNa scanning to check for genetic tampering.
So, how come these unnaturally bright orange petunias weren’t subjected to better scrutiny?
‘We will be looking at how these seeds got through,’ was all a Defra spokeswoman said yesterday. ‘Our investigations are ongoing . . . we don’t know where they are or where they have spread.’
Well, at least Defra now acknowledges the problem. earlier this month, it was still insisting it had no confirmation that the plants were even in the uK.
In fact, all that the agency’s ‘experts’ had to do was Google ‘orange petunias’ and browse any of the mainstream seed and plant companies’ online catalogues.
For they all were offering them — until the edict went out and almost all sellers purged them immediately from their websites.
the Horticultural trades association acknowledges that orange petunias have been available from numerous uK suppliers. It says it warned Defra of this and is telling suppliers that ‘any plants and seeds must now be destroyed’.
that is the only sensible option, according to Liz O’Neill, a biologist who is director of the campaign group GM Freeze.
‘untested GM plants may well have unexpected effects on the wider world of wildlife,’ she warns. ‘People often think modifying plant genes is like playing around with blocks of Lego, but science still cannot predict what incredibly complex effects these genetic alterations may ultimately have.’
She adds: ‘Scientific knowledge in this area remains in its infancy. But we do know the effects can be seriously damaging to other plants and creatures.’
Indeed, when Canadian scientists genetically modified oilseed plants to produce omega-3 oils (naturally found in fish), they found last year that butterflies which fed on them grew overweight and developed deformed wings.
and in 1999, it was suggested that GM maize, which had been altered to fight pests, was killing monarch butterflies (the crop was modified to produce a toxin to fight an insect pest called the european corn borer, but the toxin also poisoned butterflies). If GM plants kill their pollinators, this could have a disastrous effect on future food-crop production.
‘there is no real social benefit of genetically modifying petunias to turn orange. But potential risks are unknown,’ adds Liz O’Neill.
Plant sellers say the orange petunias would not survive the cold of a British winter (well, we’ve had rather warm winters of late).
But while flowering, they may affect insect pollinators, says O’Neill. ‘they are, after all, big flowers and bound to attract insects. Whether they will harm them is a complete unknown.’
Indeed, no one even knows for sure where the petunias originated. In Finland, Dr Welling says investigators are working on the theory that they were invented by scientists in Germany. But there are other suspects. a spokesman for the uK company Mr Fothergill’s Seeds says it believes the plants were originally modified in Japan.
‘We took the orange petunia seeds and plants off our website as soon as we were told about this,’ says the spokesman.
‘‘We would never market GM products. We are taking up this matter with our supplier. But we don’t believe these plants present any risk to the public.’
Such is the public and political suspicion surrounding GM science that only one genetically modified maize variety is currently authorised for cultivation in the eu (it is grown almost entirely in Spain).
But the complexity of our ecology means we mess around with genes at our peril.
For although petunias may seem a world away from human DNa, the relationship is closer than most people think.
AS eaRLy as the late eighties, an arizona university scientist’s experimental effort to create a purple petunia led to a potential breakthrough in gene medicine for aids and cancer.
In tinkering with petunia DNa, the scientist managed to turn a plant’s petals white.
He had unwittingly discovered how to make genes switch each other off, a process called ‘co-suppression’ or ‘gene silencing’ that is now being used therapeutically to try to switch off human DNa processes involved in lethal diseases.
the unknown potential effects of genetically modifying flowers have also prompted the uK Government to warn people not to sprinkle petals from GM carnations on to food for decorative purposes.
eu rules currently allow two genetically modified types of cut carnation to be imported into Britain. the purple plants have been created by the Japan-based firm Suntory Ltd.
In 2013, fearing chefs might use them as food decorations, Defra issued an edict that the carnations must be labelled ‘not for human or animal consumption’. again, no one could point to a definite risk but, given the current lack of knowledge, that does not mean there is none.
the furore over orange petunias leaves Britain’s gardeners in a quandary. If they have seeds or seedlings already in the greenhouse, it will be all too tempting to let them grow.
after all, it may be the last time anyone ever sees the things.
However, GM Freeze’s Liz O’Neill says for the insect pollinators’ sake, it would be best to eradicate these plants in the uK.
Defra says any plants found at stockists will be destroyed, but it is up to gardeners to decide what to do with existing plants.
‘It’s not illegal for gardeners to own them,’ explains a spokesman. ‘If they have been planted, homeowners don’t have to pull them up — they will die out in the winter.’
It might seem odd to consider ornamental flowers as a serious threat to us. But as Shakespeare’s Hamlet warned: ‘the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape . . .’
and given our official watchdog’s apparent inability to stop GM plants entering the uK, something very nasty could yet emerge at the bottom of our gardens.