Five Plants I Hate...

For a quick, silly read, check my bi-weekly on-line column at Santa Barbara's very own news and events website...Edhat.com.

What are YOUR bottom five?

Rated R - Horticultural Chain Saw Massacres

This blog is rated for Mature Audiences. Send the little ones out to play.

There are people out there who must hate plants and live to see their demise. There's no other explanation I can think of for the hideous photos you are about to see. Perhaps they were startled by a swaying willow tree when they were a child, or told gruesome stories about a mean thorny rose bush that eats little children. Why else would people do things like this to perfectly innocent plants?

I posit a few explanations...

No. 1: People who get paid to garden are actually plant janitors who feel that if they own pruning tools, they are obliged to use them regardless of the aesthetic results.

Fer instance...

(stub cuts, cylinders and blobs, oh my!)

...or this...

(started life as a birch tree, but something went terribly wrong)

No. 2: Rather than install plants after first considering their ultimate size, then placing them so they can grow unfettered as nature intended, someone thinks it would be fun to indiscriminately plant them into any spot in the garden, only later to be "modified" to fit the space (again ignoring the aesthetic result).

For example...

(Algerian Ivy in its natural habitat)

No. 3: On their planet, this is a form of humor...

(Doctor, can you do something about this lump in my throat?)

No. 4: There wasn't a big enough block of styrofoam to paint green and place at the Jack-In-The-Box drive-thru lane, so they were forced to do this to a real plant. Ah, nature!

(This is bound to bring in more burger fans)

So you see, there's always a perfectly good explanation for the visual blight we are continually subjected to. I hope this clarifies it for some of you. Just doing my part.