I have always loved growing things. I love everything about plants, you see. I love growing them and watching them grow wild. I love the way they smell, the way they look, and the way they feel when I touch them. I love growing my own tomatoes as well as sampling my neighbor Violet's fresh apples. On the other hand, I can not stand anything artificial and manufactured. I really hate all of the neatly manicured lawns all over suburban America. I can not stand the way that the same grass has been set as the standard of ground cover all over. But more than anything, I hate artificial trees.
Oh, I know that the artificial tree has come a long way. They used to be obviously manufactured, but nowadays it is hard to tell artificial outdoor plants from other ones without getting right up to them. But this very manufactured perfection of artificial outdoor plants is precisely what makes them so disgusting in my opinion. You see, a really fake artificial outdoor plant is one thing. It is meant to evoke nature and imitate it, but it pays tribute to the superiority of the natural world by its own imperfection. Being obvious forgeries, badly made artificial outdoor plants only make the real ones look that much better.
But, thanks to advances in plastics and design, artificial outdoor plants have gotten better and better. From artificial Christmas trees to plastic Japanese maples, they now have an eerie proximity to the real thing. And it is precisely this verisimilitude that bugs me so much. Modern artificial outdoor plants, being more perfect than the actual real ones, aim to supplant nature. The goal of artificial outdoor plants is to resemble the real ones as precisely as possible without having any of the inconveniences of authentic growing things. And in this perfect resemblance, they aim to replace nature.
It is hard for me to get at how much this chills me and why. Either you will understand it or you will not. To me – and I suspect to any lover of nature – it is much like a horror movie. Imagine a factory decided that it would be cheaper to make robot people who did not need to eat or sleep, and put them on the street to replace real people. This is what the spread of artificial outdoor plants looks like to me. It has all of the appearance of life without any of the vibrancy.
