Every once in a while, some clever charlatan takes Pravda-on-the-Hudson to the cleaners. And what better day for a bit of mischief along these lines than Mother’s Day!

This is what Jennifer Grayson — who passes herself off as “environmental journalist” and claims to be writing a book called Unlatched “about the breastfeeding controversy” — did today. Here is how she begins:

How’s this as a gesture of love for the woman who bore you? Chop off the reproductive organ of a plant and send it to her in a box tied up with a pretty bow. No, it’s not a weird botanical twist on the van Gogh woo-a-girl-with-a-severed-ear legend. It is what millions of us (67 percent of those celebrating the holiday) will compulsorily do to mark Mother’s Day.

Ms. Grayson clearly knows the folks at Pravda. You can be a Jew. You can be a Catholic. But if you come to America and join the establishment, you will end up as a Puritan — appalled at the thought that somewhere somebody is having a good time.

You see, the horror that millions of us engage in on Mother’s Day is that we present the old dame with, you guessed it, flowers! In fact, Ms. Grayson tells us, we spend $2.4 billion on this endeavor. And, oh, the damage that we do!

The truth is that most flowers are organic only in the truest sense of that word: highly perishable and thus susceptible to decay, as well as vermin and disease. Up to 80 percent of the 5.6 billion stems of flowers sold in the United States each year are imported. Of those, 93 percent are grown thousands of miles away in production greenhouses in Colombia or Ecuador. And it takes an awful lot of energy and artificial tinkering to keep those flowers fresh. First, they are saturated with a toxic cocktail of chemicals, many of which have been restricted or banned outright in the United States and Europe — including aldicarb, an insecticide responsible for the largest pesticide poisoning in U.S. history, in 1985, and methyl parathion, designated “one of the most toxic organophosphate pesticides” by the Environmental Protection Agency. The women who work under these conditions sometimes see their children suffer as a result of prenatal exposure. One study found that the children of Ecuadoran flower workers were at greater risk for neurological impairment and hypertension. To preserve the blooms once they’re cut, they’re stored in an energy-guzzling refrigerated warehouse, flown via cargo plane to the United States, brought to yet another refrigerated warehouse to await distribution, and — just to tack on a bit more to the carbon footprint — shipped via refrigerated truck to your mom or to the refrigerated display case at the supermarket or florist. There, the flowers lie in wait for a harried son or daughter to grab en route to Mother’s Day brunch, where still another bouquet of imported flowers makes up the table’s centerpiece. Add in the cellophane wrap, those annoying little plastic stem tubes and the bouquet’s fate a week later, emitting methane in a landfill, and you may have gotten a gift with a bigger carbon footprint than if you’d driven four hours in a Hummer to visit Mom in person. While it’s difficult to calculate the carbon footprint of a single bouquet, experts estimate that sending 100 million roses (the number believed to be given in the United States on Valentine’s Day, another big flower holiday) produces some 9,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from field to florist. The average American household has a carbon footprint of 48 tons a year.

I will say this for Ms. Grayson. It was a real feat to smuggle this send-up of liberal guilt past the censors at Pravda. If she really is writing a book on the breastfeeding controversy, it is likely to be a hoot.

Next year, perhaps, she can slip a piece in on the environmental damage done by the sacrifice of entire forests for the purpose of printing . . . Pravda-on-the-Hudson.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa: After posting this piece, I discovered that it had appeared in Pravda-on-the-Potomac, not in Pravda-on-the-Hudson, which suggests that one cannot tell one rag from the other.