Beyond Horticulture: How Culture Effects How We See Plants | Part 1
And what does Schitt's Creek and Geico have to do with it?
*Note: This post might be too long for email, so please click through your email to read the entire essay on the Substack website. Thanks!
Over the last few months I’ve written quite a bit about native plants and how that correlates to our own home gardens. There are quite a few posts about it and it is still something I think about often and you can read some of those posts here:
I’m not the only one pondering these ideas about how we can get more people to make the move to native plant gardening. I think those of us in the native plant bubble tend to blame the horticulture industry for this lack of movement with a wider audience, and they are certainly due a significant portion of this blame. But it goes much deeper than that.
I hardly watch tv commercials these days, especially since cutting cable about two years ago. But my beloved Schitt’s Creek is back on a streaming platform I pay for (Amazon) via Freevee and so I’ve been subjected to commercials for the delight of being able to hear Moira Rose’s many accents.
But damn, y’all. It isn’t just horticulture that’s the problem. It’s culture.
Deeply ingrained culture that isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Exhibit A:
It’s “Lawn Day” in the beginning of this Geico commercial where the “neighbor” commentators mention how the leaves are piling up and that they are “a bit of an eyesore.” The premise of the commercial is about bundling various insurance policies to save money, while making jokes about different things these homeowners are doing in their house. Later, when talking about bundling those insurance policies, the lady neighbor commentator casually throws in “if only they’d bundled the leaves.”
With increasing social media and other media articles pushing the “Leave the Leaves” campaign, such as this one from the Xerces Society, it would be easy to think this idea of leaving leaves on the lawn every autumn would be a popular idea, or at least one taking hold in a more mainstream way. It doesn’t take much to realize this isn’t as widespread as we might think, just drive up any suburban street during this time of year and you can see many garbage bags filled with leaves and other yard debris piled on the curb waiting to find their way to the landfill. I live in an unincorporated area of my county so we we have access to burning and therefore many people burn their leaves here, in addition to bagging leaves. Burning comes with its own set of issues, though.
So, is it any wonder why leaving the leaves isn’t taking hold when it is also a Geico commercial trope for being sure your neighbor keeps their home up to HOA standards? No one is writing a commercial about how many leipidopteran cocoons are raked up and bagged each year, nor what a detriment raking leaves is to our firefly populations. Instead, we’ll get on various social media outlets and complain about how we all used to see fireflies 40-50 years ago and “Where have they gone?” without look at our own behaviors because we can’t resist a clean yard. Or, how the people I used to watch on my NextDoor lament not seeing luna moths very often when I knew very well they bagged, mowed, or burned their leaves. There are consequences to these actions and unfortunately the wrong tropes continue to be perpetuated in seemingly innocuous settings that prohibit most from learning about these issues.
Exhibit B:
In the second commercial, it opens with the dad in the first scene talking about how they love their outdoor space but that they have “invasive weeds.” Cue a Little Shop of Horrors-esque weed that has taken hold in the driveway reaching out to annoy the older daughter in the scene. The family moves indoors to eat dinner and the weeds are vining their way into the house, up the sides of the walls, and grabbing them while they watch tv and eat popcorn on the sofa. Next thing you know the dad is grabbing the weed eater and launching an assault on the giant weeds yelling, “Get away from my family!” Cue the premise about bundling their insurance because at least Geico makes that easy and off camera you hear the younger daughter ask about “getting the spray stuff” to which the dad replies to “get the spray stuff.”
Is it any wonder so many people look at their lawns and only see “weeds” or so-called invasive plants. In recent years I’ve been dealing with the folks on my small parks board, of which I was a part of until very recently in my very tiny town (think of it is as a glorified HOA because there aren’t any businesses like at typical town, but it is actually its own city), who see native pond plants on our two ponds and only want to spray and eliminate the species. Never mind that most of these plants are really great for invertebrate and fish populations. They see plants where they want open, unencumbered water. We’ve had two park cleanup days in the last year and during each one we (my husband and I) had to choose which battles to fight as they (mostly men) worked to chainsaw and chop down as much yaupon and shrubby plants as possible. After seeing what happened at the first park cleanup and my protestations falling on deaf ears, for the second cleanup event we went around and flagged shrubs and small trees that did not need to be cut down, mostly really great native species like Vaccinium or Crataegus species. That still proved difficult, with some people busting in on previously agreed upon areas to avoid and beginning to lop plants off at the base. But let’s ignore the pile of Colocasia esculenta (elephant ears) that lines the shoreline, an actual invasive species that even if we attempted to put a hold on expansion along the pond wouldn’t matter because the plants are all upstream, too. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a need for tidying some of these spaces to a small extent. But the line goes too far when people cannot literally see the forest for the trees, or weeds in this instance.
Commercials such as this one continue to carry on this myth, that every plant out of place is invasive or a weed, that every yard must look tidy. That it’s a battle to be waged with expensive and damaging chemicals, and every plant out of place is there to wreck havoc on your life. How are pithy social media posts about how good it is to grow native plants ever going to compete with mainstream commercials that continue to perpetuate these myths?
Exhibit C:
In this lovely commercial, Geico wants to let you know that getting car insurance is as easy as getting seasonal allergies! In what actually appears to be a really pretty garden set design, the actress walks around lamenting how she used to stop and smell everything—before the pollen. There are even little bits of unidentifiable “pollen” floating through the air as she sniffs and takes cuttings of flowers. Then she blames what looks to be a peony for her allergies! Geico promotes their app and then it cuts to the actress being overly dramatic and falling to her knees in the middle of this garden while cursing “ragweed pollen.” Except, where’s the ragweed? I see none.
I’m not going to discount someone’s very real allergies out there to, um, peonies, but all this commercial does, like the others above, is alienate plants to humans. I’m honestly surprised there wasn’t a field of goldenrod at the end where she declares her hatred of ragweed pollen so I guess we can be thankful that myth wasn’t pulled out to use here. But, at least when cursing ragweed, maybe show some ragweed? This is almost as bad as the red-tailed hawk sounds being used for bald eagles in western movies!
This one is probably the laziest of all of the commercials. Do I expect Geico to hire a professional naturalist or biologist as a consultant for their commercials? No, but maybe they should. '
I’m certainly not picking on only Geico here as these commercials are only a drop in the very large bucket of cultural symptoms of anti-plant and anti-nature sentiments that run wild through our society. So, how are we to make the progress that we need to reclaim habitat and ecosystems in our own yards when we’re faced with such an onslaught of negative influences that drive people away from making these changes? Do we even have the time to move as slowly as this incremental progress is currently going? Native plant gardening and habitat restoration isn’t a new concept. There have been books and magazine articles written about it for the last 30-40 years and if you look deeper there are more sentiments for broader ecological issues from Rachel Carson to Thoreau. The information is there, sometimes it’s even taught in schools, but then where does it go after? What is the tipping point for action?
You can extrapolate that into topics such as climate change if you want. We’ve known for decades what is happening and yet we’re still moving at a snail’s pace to right those past wrongs. I think we can keep asking WHY? while simultaneously plugging away at the minute increments of change we can make in our daily lives. Language matters. How we talk about plants and nature matters when we’re discussing it with others. You can see how language has changed in older tv shows compared to what’s on now across a wide array of topics, and of course there are plenty of people pushing back on that because, shocker, change is hard and uncomfortable for people. It’s hard to change the way your brain thinks and sees things when you’ve been indoctrinated consciously or not on any given subject. In gardening, we’re taught from a young age that weeds are bad, mowed lawns are good, and no leaves should be on the lawn. Expand that to insects and snakes and there’s even more in our culture that creates these hang-ups. Is it any wonder it is going to take deep work to undo these myths?
Those last sentences are why I added a Part 1 to this title. I think there’s more to delve into here in future essays.
Here’s one last commercial, this one for TurboTax. It’s much more plant friendly and honestly rather soothing. I might need to buy some more indoor plants for my office now.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and On Texas Nature and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.