It wasn't until the woman went to transfer her succulent that she realized it was a plastic plant glued to a piece of styrofoam. Caelie Wilkes

One woman is “heartbroken” after finding out that she had been lovingly tending to and watering her first succulent once a week for two years only to find that the plant was a phony.

“It was so heartbreaking because it was my first succulent I was about to ‘keep alive’ so it inspired me to get more house plants and really it turned into me having a green thumb,” Caelie Wilkes, a stay-at-home mom living in Northern California, told IFLScience.

“It was full, beautiful coloring, just an overall perfect plant,” Wilkes said.

For years, the 24-year-old stuck to a detailed watering plan and became defensive if someone else tried to water her dear succulent. It wasn't until Wilkes decided it was time to transplant the succulent and found the “cutest vase” to boot that she noticed she had been living a lie. When she pulled the plant from its original container, she noticed that it had been sitting on Styrofoam with sand glued to the top.

“I put so much love into this plant! I washed its leaves. Tried my hardest to keep it looking its best, and it’s completely plastic!” she wrote in a Facebook post. “I feel like these last two years have been a lie.”

-

To those who are calling her bluff, Wilkes says that she is honestly “not fibbing.”

“I wrote this post for my family and friends,” she told IFLScience, adding that she never expected it to go viral. “Succulents don’t require a large amount of water. It was very easy to overlook.”

Nicknamed the “camels of the plant world,” succulents are peculiar plants whose unique ability to rely on very little water exemplifies convergent evolution across the animal kingdom. All succulents have large cells for water storage that can occur within plant cells in any vegetative plant organ including the roots, stems, and leaves. Their ability to store water over long periods of time appears to evolve in many different environments around the world, according to a 2017 study published in Current Biology.

Before you decide to judge her too harshly, thinking you'd never get taken in by something so stupid, let us gently remind you that 7 percent of Americans think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.