#my next 'cue to care' plan involves a taser (sadly illegal in the UK so may require a workaround)

[elephantbitterhead]

An additional downside of this rightly-berated-by-OP approach is that the popularity of this ugly brutality means that it becomes the only thing many non-gardening people recognize as landscaping. So if, like me, you have a lush, thriving wild garden, anyone who is not themselves invested in naturalistic planting will see your garden & just say 'Man, fuck this wasteland.' They will empty every kind of bin & bucket over your plants, they will trample them to death, they will stomp past them heedlessly snapping their beautiful, arching bodies, etc. When they're not actually killing your plants, they will be flinging trash around and destroying features like rock or wood piles. It doesn't matter how many 'cues to care' you include, it doesn't even matter if you're actually standing right there telling them to stop. Nothing I have tried thus far has convinced a single workman/contractor/etc. to give my garden a break. Even if they seem to feel bad when you point out what they're doing, they're right back at it as soon as you leave the scene. Guys! I've spent 10 years trying to make a neglected mess of nettle, dock, and coal ash look like an actual landscape and YOU ARE HARMING IT. OK, well, the plants are tough so you're probably not really harming it that much in the long term but my god you are standing on things I grew from seed and you are pissing me off so severely you have no idea.

I 100% guarantee they are not doing this in some dope's mulched-up sea of garden-center bedding plants. Because THAT'S what they see as a real garden. They may not be treating those plants with tender care, but they're not stomping all over them like they're not even there or just dumping their toxic slop bucket directly into an edged bed.

Imagine if baking bread was a skill any person living independently in their own house needed to have at least a passing familiarity with, so there were endless books, blogs and websites about how to bake bread, but none of them seemed to contain the most basic facts about how bread actually works.

You would go online and find questions like "Help, I put my bread in the oven, and it GOT BIGGER!" and instead of saying anything about bread naturally rises when you put yeast in it, the results would be advertising some kind of $970 device that punches the bread while it's baking so it doesn't rise.

Even the most reliable, factually grounded sources available would have only the barest scraps of information on the particularities of ingredients, such as how different types of flour differ and produce different results, or how yeast affects the flavor profile of bread. Rice flour, barley flour, potato flour and amaranth flour would be just as common as wheat flour, but finding sources that didn't treat them as functionally identical would be near impossible. At the same time, websites and books would list specific brands of flour in bread recipes, often without specifying anything else.

An unreasonable amount of people would be hellbent on doing something like baking a full-sized loaf of bread in under 3 minutes, and would regularly bake bread to charred cinders at 700 degrees in an attempt to accomplish this, but instead of gently telling people that their goal is not realistic, books claiming to be general resources would be framed entirely around the goal of baking bread as fast as possible, with entire chapters devoted to making the charred bread taste like it isn't charred.

Anyway, this is what landscaping is like.