Last week I looked out my window at work and saw a small army of gardeners arriving in the plaza below.
They unloaded about a hundred flats of pansies, yellow ones and purple ones. Over the course of two days they installed these flowers in the planting beds, spaced very precisely so that the beds will look like solid purple or yellow shapes when the plants reach their fullness, about a month from now. Then, as happened last year, the pansies will be ripped out before they become straggly and go to seed. They will be replaced by summer flowers, also in solid color blocks, probably petunias.
My mindstream was a flood of negative judgments about this "instant garden," about the chemicals that were probably used at the nursery to create these highly uniform plants, about how the workers were probably not paid very well, about how the flowers themselves were somehow being exploited by being used in this way. Of course, to go with all this aversion there was also this: how nice might it be to have this skilled, industrious landscaper platoon visit my wild and weedy yard with their nursery flats and their mulch?
One day at lunch time I went down for a look. One of the gardeners smiled when I went to take a close-up picture. His words stopped me right there and made me take a deep, full breath: "Very beautiful flowers."
