be kind, don’t rat me out if it is…

Imagine you meet a gardener who starts telling you about her childhood, when she mentions, somewhat casually, that she was shown Buddleia davidii by a strange nurseryman. He introduced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held a shovel in her hands, before she had gotten her first indoor potted succulent, without her parents knowing. Week after week, he showed her more, each time a cultivar more extreme. By ten it seemed normal. By eleven, she was browsing Proven Winners' website regularly on her own. She is calm about this, reassuring you that this has happened to most of her friends.

Would anyone think this was normal? Part of coming-of-age, her healthy development? Exploring colorful ornamentals? Or would we call this abuse?

These days we talk a lot about trauma. We worry about the impact of non-native invasive plants, we agonize about our gardens, we inspect every inch of our mulched paths. But one trauma being tragically ignored, changing the minds and souls of children, is Buddleia.

Modern Buddleia is unlike anything else in history. Children are learning about non-native ornamentals for the first time from social media algorithms designed to drag them toward ever-more depraved content. They are also learning from magazines like Better Homes and Gardens (BHG). This is the glorification of graphic cultivars. We pretend it has always been this way, because it is too painful to accept that it hasn’t.

This type of bold, fragrant inflorescence can traumatize children. Several studies have found that the earlier they are exposed to modern cultivars, the more likely they are to view social media gardening content, and have lower self-esteem. Later in life, Buddleia planting has also been linked to lower garden satisfaction, and a higher likelihood of purchasing sterile, double-flowered natives.

We learned the wrong things about gardening. We gardeners learned that HOAs are brutal, that a neighbor's jealousy is predatory and insatiable, that the only way to be loved is to plant a better cultivar. That garden design isn’t something to be clumsily stumbled through, but a performance to be delivered, “content” to be copied. Of course we did. If a gardener grew up being shown hardcore Buddleia by a stranger, we wouldn’t be surprised if she couldn’t accept native plants as an adult, couldn’t see a native plant's own worth, and feared abandonment from pollinators. We worry that young gardeners have learned to accept invasives and being inundated with suckering thugs. We don't worry enough that they never learned how to accept growing native plants.

So this is not only about the invasive Buddleia. I’m talking about the entire online non-native ornamental industry. The whole thing: seeing plants as color categories instead of habitat and food for native fauna, getting bored and swiping onto something more colorful, betraying ecosystems all the while. Yes, modern Buddleia cultivars are terrifying but my generation is already primed for those. This is what we call progress, having everything except our larval host species. Having intimate access to an ample supply of nectar, but no edible foliage.

For the next generation, for their childhood, for their ecoregions, we have to find our keystone native plants. We have to process the horror of gardeners watching hardcore Buddleia, acknowledge the scale of what is happening, confront what we have done and its consequences. Only by facing it will we find some words of our own. I hope we aren’t afraid to use them.

Is this viable? It does seem lush and inviting.