CBS Sunday Morning had a segment on weeds today, and it
reminded me of a piece about invasive plants I wrote a few weeks ago but forgot to post. So here it
is:
I was watching Masterpiece Mystery recently (Inspector Lewis), and it started out with some woman asking a group
of students to help her eradicate a species of Rhododendron (ponticum) from the
Oxford Botanical Gardens. And that made me think of a possible new show called Rhoda (for Rhododendron).
This new show Rhoda
could be all about some plant, a Rhododendrum ponticum, who is squatting in a
garden in England somewhere, but everyone wants to throw her out. So every
episode is how she feels discriminated against, evades capture, gets
environmentalists to intervene on her behalf, etc., until she gets to take over
all of England with her deadly green-hell-spawn. And this could be a satire
about political correctness, prejudice, anti-immigration sentiment, etc., in England, but from an
invasive plant species’ perspective. (And they could make the point that
weeding a garden of plants like Rhoda is just as discriminatory as trying to
prevent other ethnicities/nationalities from emigrating or disallowing
multiculturalism, etc., and calling her a weed is like a racist pejorative attack, and assuming she will try to take over the country just because she is a weed is a bigoted prejudicial assumption, etc.; but that all that stuff notwithstanding, weeds really do take over everything if you let them, so you cannot really treat them like human beings, because they’re not like people. So in this show, all the socially aware characters can do all the politically correct things, but it always ends in disaster, because it is misguided to treat weeds like people. {For the uninitiated, these British mystery shows like
to have a lot of social values stuff in their programmes, so they’re always
trying to make a new plot about something to do with racism, immigration,
multiculturalism, etc. And I thought it might be fun to show the flagrant
double-standard people have about plants, where everyone oppresses poor innocent plants
just because they are considered to be “the wrong kind”.})
Now wouldn’t that be fun? Plus, it would be the first show
to regularly cast gardeners as the murderous villains in every episode, saying
anyone who wants to remove Rhoda from their garden is just a xenophobe, etc. And
they could say their hands are stained with the green blood of chlorophyll (and that green blood is what makes a “green thumb” green), and
that they’re planting the seeds of their own destruction by killing plants like
Rhoda, etc. And then, with the well-intentioned but ultimately unwise action of some green movement agitators, England
is conquered by foreign plants which take over like The Day of the Triffids. (Because people find out that political correctness does not apply to weeds, but by then, it’s too late!)
(Oh, and they could have subplots about how her saplings get
addicted to Miracle Gro plant spikes and stuff, or how unfair it is that she
and her kind are oppressed, when some people take great care to secretly grow
other weeds, like marijuana, etc.)
And this is what it’s going to look like when the
environmentalists unknowingly abet these evil invasive species of plants to
conquer the world (!):
