Yesterday I saw some maintenance workers in front of a business digging up all of the beautiful yellow and white flowers planted in front of their building. They were just tossing all of the plants into a garbage can, that I assume will just be recycled, it didn’t look like they were being careful enough with the plants for them to be transplanted anywhere.

This morning I drove by the same business and looked – there were new, different flowers planted there.

Now I don’t know much about gardening, so I’m not sure what they are, but the plants that were being dug up and tossed away – looked very much like what we’ve got growing along the boulevard in front of our house. They’re small, ground cover flowers – almost like on a low bush, they’ve been in bloom for quite some time now – and if I remember correctly from last year, will stay in bloom for awhile. We do nothing with them – they just come back every year – and have spread out a bit which is great for where they’re at in our yard.

So is it normal practice for businesses to just dig up perfectly good plants and throw them away so that they can change them out? And then they’ll maybe do the same next year and put back in what was there before because of seasonality? Do the companies that do landscaping and yard work at business every keep those plants and offer them to the public? Maybe they wouldn’t be any good, but it just seems like such a waste to me.