Unlike most plants, which follow the predictable cycle of birth-growth-reproduction-death, Luo Dengqiang's lotus seedlings live more of a James Bond lifestyle.
Some fly to outer space, others get close to the Olympic action. In some quarters, there is talk that mutant strains may one day threaten the Earth's fragile ecosystem.
Even their owner has a deceptively villainous-sounding moniker: China's Lotus King. But ask his two adopted daughters, or any of the seven people with disabilities whom he has helped support financially, and they will reassure you he is in fact a local hero - and celebrity.
Luo, whose fertilizer-enhanced kingdom stretches over 526 varieties of the lotus plant, some of which have taken root near the iconic Bird's Nest, or National Stadium, has been tasked with a job that would make even the sturdiest of superheroes tremble: helping beautify Beijing.
In lieu of any special gadgets, or special powers, he is utilizing the power of (space) plants in bloom.
"As a gift from Chongqing Municipality to the Beijing Olympic Games, my space lotus is a good demonstration of the twin concepts of a Green Olympics and a High-tech Olympics," said Luo, a former model worker who was elected as a delegate to the Chongqing Municipal People's Congress earlier this year.
Luo, a 55-year-old farmer from Southwest China, elected not to join the so-called "bang bang (pole) army" of migrant porters in the big cities.
Instead, he likes to keep his hands dirty - not by dealing in classified information, but by plugging his hands into the earth and watching it sprout mini, multicolored miracles.
The final frontier
Now he can safely call himself the first Chinese farmer to send seeds into outer space.
The Beijing Aerospace Satellite Application Corporation agreed in 2005 to send 3,000 of his lotus seeds on an otherwordly mission for an average transportation fee of 300 yuan ($41) per seed.
Although the trip came at a bargain basement cost compared to the tens of millions of dollars spent by humans to do more or less the same, Luo is not finding it easy to foot the bill, which has already stretched into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Nonetheless, 200 of his seeds have already returned from going where no seeds have gone before aboard the Shenzhou VI, China's first manned spacecraft, and China's 21st and 22nd recoverable satellites.
"I learnt from reading local newspapers that breeding seeds in space could help improve the production and quality of agricultural products in 2000," he said.
"Back then I had a vision of sending my seeds out there and developing 'space lotuses' with longer blooming periods and a greater wealth of color tones."
Now the so-called space seeds come in a variety of shapes and sizes, with a rainbow of colors on offer besides the traditional pink and white, such as blue, green, red and yellow.
"My original plan was to develop a series representing the five colors of the Olympic rings, but that's proving tough," he said.
Dishes made of lotus roots play an important role in Chinese cuisine, and the new hybrids may give chefs more options.
"Even the lotus roots are bigger and taste sweeter than before," he said.
A hard road to travel
Luo invested all of his savings from working as a taxi driver for 13 years to open his own restaurant in 1997 and developed it into a successful vacation resort that offers his wife's secret formula fish dish and a great view of their lotus pond.
"My only headache so far is that the lotuses only blossom for three months from May to August. My business suffers for the rest of the year.
Facing this obstacle, he set out on another botanical engineering project to find a way of making the lotuses bloom all year round.
He thought the answer might lie in outer space - and funnily enough it did.
Having spent upwards of 4.5 million yuan ($600,000) to give the seeds an extra-terrestrial passport and build a lotus breeding lab, Luo has almost realized his dream: some of his lotus flowers now bloom for 320 days a year.
"The exposure to shortwave radiation at a high altitude, and the absence of gravity, increases the chances of genetic transformations affecting terrestrial plants and animals," Wang Yingwei, a researcher with the Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told China Daily.
"A space trip might be the fastest way to generate genetic changes to seedlings."
Yet the long-term effects on the environment (or on people's health) of mixing mutant seeds with wild strains remains a scary factor in this ongoing research.
"Personally, I think the fear-mongering is mostly down to people's natural fear of the unknown," said Wang.
Luo said that so far at least, they have done more good than harm.
"My lotus flowers have brought so much joy to tourists and generated so much business for my village that I can only be proud of what I've done," he said.
