How to Turn Me Off a Gardening Book in One Quick Phrase

[pantryslut]

"...but we don't tend a rose in order to destroy it."

I had several snarky responses to this, including:

1) You haven't met many goths, have you?

2) What the heck is clipping it and putting it in a vase, then?

This woman is clearly of the same stripe as all those sweetness 'n light pagans that I so abhor -- no negativity in a garden! It's all bright living things and cultivating beauty, whee! Now I am remembering with some gratification digging up the ugly overgrown magenta rose bush at the old house. Not to mention squashing slugs between my (gloved!) fingers in the middle of the night.

I never liked roses much anyway.

Comments

Squashing slugs

[sadojewess.livejournal.com]

Do slugs pop when you squash them?

Re: Squashing slugs

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Like the bubbles on bubble wrap.

[kiya]

On the other hand, I once made a lovely dry rose wine.

I firmly believe in growing things that I can ferment.

[brooksmoses]

3) Has this person ever heard of the "multiflora roses" menace?

They're a sort of variety of rose bush that the various agricultural offices in Virginia (and, presumably, elsewhere in the Appalachias) in the 1970s were advising that people plant lots of, because they were hardy and grew without needing tending and produced lots of stuff for birds to eat. (They have flowers that are closer to apple-tree flowers than cultivated roses.)

Then, a few decades later, people noticed that these are large thorny bushy plants (a one-plant briar patch, essentially) that grow and spread quite happily without needing tending, and the birds like to spread their seeds far and wide, and they're a royal pain because they tend to grow in the space between pasture and forest where one usually has the fences, and the agricultural offices are all but putting a bounty on the things to try to control them.

[redbird]

On point 2, she may be distinguishing between the rose-bush and the individual flowers.

But yes, gardening is a process of selection, and almost always involves killing X to make more room for Y or Z.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that, if pressed, she would distinguish between the rose bush and the plant. But in context, she was talking about how other human creations are too often "skewed toward darkness," but gardens aren't.

I suppose I won't confess to her my fantasy about planting the yard of the old house full of bright, bee-friendly flowers...precisely because one of the evil ex-housemates is allergic to bees. (Didn't do it.)