Okay, honestly, here are two things that bother me about this:
1) Honestly, if you look at the original cross-polination setup, aside from certain plants having physical similarities (which I expect some of us will sit down and map out as soon as we know which plants are being produced), if someone could logically explain to me how one crosses campion flowers and lillies OR poppies and bullrushes, and both of those combinations give you snow drops, I'll be happy to accept the answer given by Sakkarah, but since I'm betting no one can, I'm going to decry this as programmer's laziness.
I mean, honestly, it's not about the realistic combination of plants. Water plant + prickly pear cactus = snake plant? Tribarrel cactus + prickly pear cactus = barrel cactus (or couldn't you just split a tribarrel into three singles?)? It's about the minigame of cross-polination. It's about having fun. No one looked at the original system and said, "Wow, those combinations made sense." Because, by and large, they didn't. I bet any of us could have mapped out similarites between the plants sufficient enough to make it work.
2) Really? The art investment in creating a couple of new plants is that intensive? Are you kidding me? The art team supposedly created new art we were supposed to be seeing 2 months ago, and that's still not happened. So, uh, come on guys. If you're that desperate for art time, maybe pay someone in the UO community that does good artwork a small stipend to create art for you on an as-needed, contractual basis?
So instead, what will happen, is people will get tired of looting the seeds, especially since there's no control over what appears, and the gardners will either have to go hunt for them on their own, or certain plants will just be unavailable. I don't understand why this is a good design decision. Gardners have not yet ceased gardening the old plants -- of course, there's still an ever-present mini-game there. See, you failed to understand that the gardening was as much about cross-polination as it was growing the plant. What made the Tokuno system bad was that it was limited in scope. You've just done the same thing.
I'm sorry, but this answer bothers me the most. Again, I'm going to have to call programmer laziness on this, and it's answers like this that REALLY make me see this as a small bone thrown to the gardening community to keep them mildly interested.
I honestly don't care if you like how they looked hued. You really have two choices in that matter: (1) You could recreate the original artwork and create properly hueing items -- you know, like chairs and banners, and such -- but I suspect no one on the current design team knows how to do that, or we wouldn't have clothing pieces that were designed in full-color KNOWING that they would be rehued -- and of course, this would require that over-worked art team to do something; (2) you could have simply realized that while YOU may not like some of the colors, some of us DO like how the colored plants look in among other plants, and in your decision, you've robbed us of the opportunity of further choice in our personal decorative designs.
I mean, honestly, since you're taking extra time to get this publish out, why not hold off another month and do this gardening thing properly:
(1) Add cross-pollination (just make it a new set, the gardners will be happy)
(2) Seeds (this is a gardener's lifeblood... you're literally killing them with the current method)
(3) Add a couple of resources later on down the line... it shouldn't be too hard to plug them in.
And while you're at it:
(4) We need sugar to be somewhere other than on paragons.
(5) We need vanilla to be somewhere other than on paragons.
And if you tell me that the cocoa tree will produce cocoa, sugar, AND vanilla, I'm going to redirect you to your answer about plants having nothing in common with each other and wonder what's going on.
If you ask me... these design decisions are further proof that UO is in the wrong hands. At very least, its gardening system is.
