What is it with people and growing green things? You’d have thought that when Spring rolls around after a drab winter and we’re all fagged out by the interminable shades of grey, that with the sight of green things growing – whether they be wild flowers and hedgerow plants, or larger bushes burgeoning with buds – we’d all heave a sigh of relief and bask in the glory of wild plants a-growing.
Yet for the sad and fixated many, the first day of Spring seems to be a signal, not for the Groundhog to stick his little pouch-cheeked Bill Murray-like face out of the ground somewhere in Punxsutawney PA, and say, Yup, that’s it folks, Spring is here, but to wince and reflexively reach for the Glyphosate and the spray gun.
Everywhere the demented kit themselves out with bondage-themed garb, strap on their appurtenances, and start mixing up concoctions of agent orange in their endless quest to drench the impudent green plants – how dare they grow!! – with whatever is the latest cocktail of choice in the world of the eco-destructor.
After all, we can’t have wild green things actually being allowed to proliferate at roadsides and in verges, they might get ideas above their station and fight back by producing flowers, seeds and fruit, and feeding those benighted butterflies and bothersome birds. Much better eradicate the wild and growing and replace it with a wonderful vista of dead, brown and shrivelled desert. That’ll teach them.
