"For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!"
About this Quote
Abbey’s line reads like a toast raised in a bar that happens to be on fire. The swaggering gusto ("Bricks to all greenhouses!") is comedic on purpose, but it’s also a pressure valve: he’s mocking any attempt to domesticate what should remain unruly. The preference isn’t really about flowers. It’s about control. Wildness here is a moral category, not a botanical one.
The language performs the politics. "Wild, free, spontaneous" stacks like a manifesto, then he pivots to cartoonish hexes: "Black thumb and cutworm". He’s not politely arguing against cultivation; he’s cursing it, casting the greenhouse as a small-scale version of the same managerial mindset that dams rivers, paves deserts, and turns living systems into display pieces. The insult "potted" is doing cultural work too: it implies containment, ownership, and decor. Nature as interior design.
Context matters: Abbey, a prickly patron saint of American environmental dissent, wrote in the era when the modern environmental movement was professionalizing. Regulations, parks, visitor centers, interpretive signage - the well-intended infrastructure of saving nature by organizing it. His provocation is aimed at that soft authoritarian streak in preservation: the desire to keep things "safe" and "beautiful" by limiting their autonomy.
The subtext is personal as much as political. Abbey isn’t offering a workable gardening policy; he’s staking out an identity built on refusal. The joke lands because it’s exaggerated, but the exaggeration reveals a real suspicion: when we curate life too carefully, we don’t protect it. We replace it with a tidier substitute.
The language performs the politics. "Wild, free, spontaneous" stacks like a manifesto, then he pivots to cartoonish hexes: "Black thumb and cutworm". He’s not politely arguing against cultivation; he’s cursing it, casting the greenhouse as a small-scale version of the same managerial mindset that dams rivers, paves deserts, and turns living systems into display pieces. The insult "potted" is doing cultural work too: it implies containment, ownership, and decor. Nature as interior design.
Context matters: Abbey, a prickly patron saint of American environmental dissent, wrote in the era when the modern environmental movement was professionalizing. Regulations, parks, visitor centers, interpretive signage - the well-intended infrastructure of saving nature by organizing it. His provocation is aimed at that soft authoritarian streak in preservation: the desire to keep things "safe" and "beautiful" by limiting their autonomy.
The subtext is personal as much as political. Abbey isn’t offering a workable gardening policy; he’s staking out an identity built on refusal. The joke lands because it’s exaggerated, but the exaggeration reveals a real suspicion: when we curate life too carefully, we don’t protect it. We replace it with a tidier substitute.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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