Suburban landscaping - which, as an outgrowth of greater cultural and economic motivations, tends to reflect those motivations - is fundamentally cruel in its effects.
The suburban landscaping project seeks to tear everything around it out of its context, to serve the pleasure of the individual who has the energy and resources to do or permit the tearing.
The suburban individual, which has become impoverished due to a lack of connection, constantly needs to form connections at a rapid pace, connections which decay just as quickly, and require a constant changing out and renewal.
So a popular plant is torn from its context, and placed into its planter, and as soon as the owner becomes bored with this arrangement, or the property changes owners, which is also increasingly the case, then the plant must be torn out again and destroyed, along with all of the communities that sprung up around that plant.
All of the promise and potential behind that small ecology which is artificially started is swept away, just as easily as it was suggested and initiated. This is a cruelty that is built into the movements of capital itself.
The tearing does seek to preserve certain valued parts: the plant and some of the soil perhaps, but then everything that is connected is done violence to and swept away. Communities on many different levels, whether human, animal, plant, etc. all experience this to an extent. The violence that is done needs to be just enough to move things where the powerful want them, but little enough that there is a catastrophic failure of whatever is being extracted, but even that consideration is rapidly passing away. So whether one is destroyed or preserved is a matter of luck, spatial location, differential of power, value to dominant culture, and etc.
And anything that is torn from its context to be artificially grafted into the next requires a tearing of other things from other contexts, so as to connect it and situate it to its new context, as everything is interconnected and requires this. So the tearing triggers many other tears, and the new arrangement rapidly decays, and so it all begins afresh.
A question is begged here: why the rapid decay? A very interesting question, but one I'll have to look at another time.
