As part of a course I had to create detailed plan for a horticultural business. My plan was to attack everything I hate about horticulture at once: predatory business practices, ecologically destructive product, boring landscaping, alienating philosophy. Town and Country would be a unionised co-op dedicated to killing lawns and replacing them with biocentric alternatives, the whole thing serving as a way to study the kind of theory I want to write.
I decided to make it as confrontational as possible. Beyond the logo and name, my marketing shits on the industry as much as it does traditional lawns and suburbia. My pitch to the class used explicit left language to describe the problems and solutions. I made the case for an inclusive unionised workplace, left urbanism, and eco-Marxism at a fairly right-wing university.
Everyone I spoke to about it either agreed with the idea or wanted to work with it. None of the youth of today liked lawns or working in the green industry. Some of them even had pure hate in their heart after working in nurseries. I might end up starting it next year as my consulting business with a small crew of radicals.
It’s desperately needed. Especially here in the high desert, Kentucky bluegrass is a plague. Working for traditional landscapers here feels evil because they’re selling the Disney-ass delusion that you can transplant your Midwestern suburban ideal to Colorado. All so that people can have a patch of green concrete that looks like shit. There’s so much room for teaching people a new value system through stewarding land for the benefit of something beyond themselves.
Right, and landscaping in an area as dry as some parts of the central western U.S. is a very delicate art but it’s also critically important it is done mindfully because it is a very delicate ecosystem. Some people won’t like the aesthetic but screw em.
I think in less dry parts of the U.S. just the pitch that your yard could be wildflowers instead of grass and it’s better for you and the environment could have pretty broad appeal.
This could also position your org to be actively antagonizing HOA’s all the time. Could actually be productive struggle, seems like a good place to make enemies.