the rotten dianthus
I may be a bit sensitive to this – but the music within shopping centers is usually first just ugly and secondly as it is usually in addition perpetual and repeating it makes me want to run out of the shopping centers right away. (The music in some of the shopping centers over here is actually in my view a torment to the employees and really a case for a health review!).
I know what I am talking about since I worked once in a gardening center in Germany, where the shopping music was also rather terrible which made working there almost unbearable.
Luckily the garden center in Germany had an outside section in which nobody wanted to work as it was very cold and rainy. So I happily worked there in solitude and cold. My task was to “beautify” primulas. Garden center plants are usually made to be sold within a certain time period and thus they are rather pushed to fulfill this task (like usually the pot is too small and often they are treated with all sorts of bad technology) which on the other hand makes them rather fragile. So “Beautifying primulas” meant to take manually off the rotten leaves in order to make the primulas look fresh and healthy (which they weren’t). I must have beautified thousands (really!) of primulas, since it was basically my only task there for about a month. (And indeed when the primula season was over they led me off..:)). So I have some weakness for these overhyped fragile garden center plants and sometimes I just feel the urge to save them. However by buying them I support these bad garden centers and thus support the loss of biodiversity in some way. Moreover the plants die easily as they are fragile, so this kind of endeavor usually ends badly. Lets see what will happen to the below rotten dianthus from the family Caryophyllaceae, which had been abandoned by the local gardening center and was thus very cheap:
