Young vlogger provides a window on plants

Chen Qiqi, a 26-year-old vlogger from southwest China's Sichuan Province, has used short videos to post information about plants for one year and a half, with informative and interesting videos she has produced winning wide praise on the internet.

Chen Qiqi is a plant enthusiast. (yangtse.com/courtesy of interviewee)

Chen majored in plant protection at Sichuan Agricultural University, in Chengdu, capital city of Sichuan. She said students majoring in this discipline usually choose to pursue further studies or apply for jobs related to customs quarantine inspections.

Chen had been a science teacher after graduating from the university. But she has always been obsessed with plants.

Chen Qiqi takes pictures of plants in the wild. (yangtse.com/courtesy of interviewee)

Chen started with strange plants she had seen on the internet, including cattail grass which "explodes" after being squeezed, and Hygrocybe psittacina Kanst, which looks like a green umbrella. The fifth video released by her attracted more than 1.3 million likes and received 38,000 comments on short-video platforms.

She then began discussing plants that people commonly saw, or those that sounded familiar but people had never seen before. In a video about daylily, a flower commonly seen in China but many people didn't know much about it, Chen said that because the flower usually blooms early in the morning and fades at night, the word "day" appears in its name.

She also said that daylily has been associated with mother since ancient times in China.

Photo shows daylily in a video made by Chen Qiqi. (Screenshot from Chen Qiqi's Douyin account)

Chen spends one third of her time making videos and one third looking for plants. She once found Drosera peltata, also called the shield sundew, during a trip to a village in southeast China's Fujian Province.

"We went to the village located in the mountains to make a video about insects. On our way back at night, we came across Drosera peltata along the roadside," Chen recalled.

Photo shows Drosera peltata, which feeds on insects. (Screenshot from Chen Qiqi's Douyin account)

According to Chen, it's not easy to find Drosera peltata in the wild. This time, she found the plant growing in pebbles in the mountains, which she thought was special because the plant usually grows in marshes.

In Chen's video, the Drosera peltata plant revealed itself as a predator.

Chen said plants that feed on insects don't need fat or protein from the insects, but minerals. She also said that although it looks like a relentless "killer," Drosera peltata needs insects as pollinators, and that's why there is a considerable distance between its flowers and leaves.

Last year, Chen read 40 to 50 books about plants, as well as related articles. To make sure she could accurately discuss the plants, Chen had to read many articles about them until she was finally able to properly describe the plants.

Chen said she plans to launch a new video series to show where food people eat comes from, and in the future, she wants to travel to more places in the country, such as Yunnan Province and Xizang and Xinjiang Uygur autonomous regions, to introduce more plants to her viewers.

Over the past one year and a half, the young woman has produced and published more than 110 videos about plants, and attracted around 1.5 million followers across various platforms.