I didn't have time to visit ELP during daylight hours, so I had to grab today's stone from the roadside.  I staffed the WNPS booth at the Northwest Flower & Garden Show.  While I was there for three hours, talking to people about native plants, I observed people's behavior.  Next to our booth was a booth for the rhododendron garden in Federal Way.  They brought in two rhododendrons, one that was showy white and another that was small, orange, and like an orchid.  In our booth was a healthy young hemlock tree.  No one gave our little tree more than a passing glance.  Hundreds of people stopped to admire the rhododendrons, some of them oohing and ahhing and making a big fuss.  Were the rhododendrons more attractive or better than my little hemlock tree?  Why? 

For their gardens, most people choose bright colors, simple shapes, and order.  Most gardens are unnatural.  Especially the display gardens at this show.  The ideal garden, according to the throngs of people who come to this annual event, is a perversion of nature.  Gardening, or horticulture, is the opposite of nature.  It is taking species out of nature and making them jump through hoops in tidy little circus acts.  Gardening, as practiced, is not ecological.  The gardening industry has a huge impact on the environment, shipping all those plants, introducing invasive species, disturbing native habitats, adding pesticides and fertilizers.  If all of the space used for gardens could be converted to native plant ecosystems, the world would be a much healthier place.  The book Bringing Nature Home by Douglas Tallamy describes what a benefit to our environment this could be. 

Why don't people want native plants in their yards?  Why is a flat green lawn bordered by flower beds and severely pruned shrubs considered more beautiful or desirable?  Why is it that people walk through Eagle Landing Park and ignore nature as if it was a waste of space?  Part of the reason is due to commerce and capitalism.  Demand is manufactured for unnatural landscapes through images and poetic writing.  A whole industry depends on cultivating a hatred of nature and natural beauty.  The first thing you do when you build a home is to strip away nature, even the soil.  Then you import plants from elsewhere and even import new, lifeless soil. 

Everywhere I looked at the flower and garden show, I saw the manipulation and explotation of nature in unnatural configurations and uses.  Even those displays that used native species tended to set them in neat configurations, tame, not wild.  I hope my time spent at the flower show was of benefit to the people I spoke to, because I would much rather have been in my park, in nature.