Ill-Fated Flowerbed

Squidward's begonias are pushing up daisies.

Flowers are beautiful, and gardeners from all around the world take great care of them and spend a lot of time tending to their flowerbeds. Unfortunately, flowers also are fragile and damaging them is easy.

This sad fate happens to fictitious flower parterres quite regularly. They can be accidentally Trampled Underfoot or mowed down by The Klutz, blown away by Hostile Weather, stolen by unscrupulous and mean-spirited characters, etc. Often to the horror of the poor gardener who loved his flowers (which are often begonias) a lot, sometimes to the point of triggering a violent ire within him.

More rarely, the ruination befalls vegetable gardens or lawns instead of flowers.

A Sister Trope to That Poor Plant (plant gets sacrificed to show the danger of something).

Compare Priceless Ming Vase, Doomed New Clothes.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Sword Art Online: During the Underworld arc, Kirito takes care of a bunch of flowers that he cared for as a graduation gift for his teacher in the Swordcraft Academy. However, it's trampled by two rival students he and Eugeo had a beef with. That said, it is subverted as Kirito has his first taste of what Incarnation can do by restoring those flowers to their original condition.

Comic Books

• Achille Talon: One gag involves Achille trying to bring a bucket of fresh, quality soil to his fancy love interest Virgule de Guillemets. His car malfunctions and he has to ask a truck with a load of mud to tow him to his destination. Unfortunately, when they arrive at Virgule's, the lorry unloads all the soil on her philodendrons, ruining them.
• Asterix in Britain has a scene where an English gardener stands back to admire a lawn that has taken generations to train into its current immaculate state — just in time for a chase scene to go pounding across it.

Comic Strips

• Baby Blues: Darryl is away from home, and calls to see how Wanda and toddler Zoe are doing. Wanda reports that they are outside "flowering the weed bed." He questions if Wanda misspoke: surely she meant "weeding the flowerbed." As Zoe gleefully tears flowers out of the ground, Wanda says she wishes that was true.
• Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin has destroyed his mother's flower garden on several occasions. Once trying to parachute out of his room, and landing in the rosebushes, and in another instance while trying to dig for a pool.
• The Far Side: A dog decides to take out the neighbor's flowerbed once and for all, by using a bulldozer on it.
• Garfield is very fond of playing in flowerbeds and utterly annihilating them at the same time. Jon eventually found a way to get even with him.
  Jon: How do you like my new plastic flower garden?
  Garfield: CHEATER!
• Similarly to Garfield, Grimmy from Mother Goose and Grimm has some destructive tendencies towards flowerbeds and gardens in general.

Film — Animation

• Lady and the Tramp:
  • A mild example in the first movie. Lady accidentally digs out one of the Darlings' tulips while burying a bone. She puts it back quickly, only she puts it in upside-down.
  • Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure: Tramp's son Scamp knocks over a flowerpot and tramples through a bed of tulips while singing "A World Without Fences", a song about how he wants to be free from the confines of a garden and go on adventures.
• The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: Tigger "bounces" Rabbit and destroys his garden.
  Rabbit: Oh Tigger, look what you've done to my beautiful garden!
  Tigger: Yeuch! Messy, isn't it?
  Rabbit: Messy? Messy? IT'S RUINED!
• Sleeping Beauty: Flora, the good fairy with plant powers, laments that her nicest flowers always being ruined by Maleficent.
• Wallace & Gromit: In The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, vegetable gardens are Serious Business in W&G's neighborhood, so the pair make money removing rabbits off people's gardens. Then the eponymous Were-Rabbit arrives and destroys gardens all over town, which is treated by the populace as akin to a murderous rampage.

Film — Live-Action

• George of the Jungle: Ape goes, well, ape when Shep the elephant drops a wooden log on his rosebed.
  Ape: No, not ON THE ROSES! Aaaaaugh!
• Latter Days: Mentioned when Andrew recalls how a man he once date, who got put through shock therapy by his conservative family, tried to throw himself out the window after they had sex. He was fine, since they were on the first floor, but it ruined Andrew's azaleas.
  Andrew: I dated this Mormon guy once, his family put him through shock therapy. We'd have sex, he was a wild man. Then he'd want to throw himself out the window.
  Traci: So? You live on the first floor.
  Andrew: Yes, but it's hell on my azaleas.

Literature

• Angelina Ballerina: The first book has Angelina so distracted by her daydreams of dance that she falls into her neighbor's pansies and gets a scolding for it.
• Brother Cadfael: In The Rose Rent, a large and beautiful rosebush is repeatedly attacked in attempts to destroy it, as its flowers are the subject of a sentimental codicil in a property bequest.
• Discworld: Two examples involving the gardens and grounds of Unseen University:
  • Sourcery: A stampede of fleeing gargoyles destroys the lawn, a sight which makes the head gardener eat his rake in frustration.
  • Reaper Man: The zombified Windle Poons ends up emerging from the earth right under the immaculately tended lawn. Unlike the previous gardener, Modo the dwarf seems to take it surprisingly well.
    "Did it take long to get it looking like that?"
    "About five hundred years, I think."
    "Gosh, I am sorry. I was aiming for the cellars, but I seem to have lost my bearings."
    "Don't you worry about that, Mr. Poons," said the dwarf cheerfully. "Everything's growing like crazy anyway. I'll fill it in this afternoon and put some more seed down and five hundred years will just zoom past, you wait and see."
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: The prologue of volume 3 (episode 13 of the anime) shows a young Ophelia Salvadori deliberately stomping the flowers in her yard. The narration explains that she hates flowers: "Their eye-catching beauty and heavenly scents that attracted all manner of insects reminded her too much of herself," referring to the fact that she Smells Sexy to males because of her succubus ancestry.

Live-Action TV

• The Inbetweeners: In one episode, the boys take up the sport of destroying daffodils with a golf club, and repeatedly vandalize a particular flowerbed in the neighborhood. Will is skeptical at first but eventually joins in the fun, but the owner of the flowerbed catches on, figures out where they live, and stands outside screaming at them threateningly, trapping them inside for hours as they pretend not to be home.
• The Incredible Hulk (1977): "A Child in Need": Banner is working as a middle school groundskeeper. As he plants flowers at the end of one school day, the final bell rings and scores of kids race from the building, trampling the flowers and ruining all his hard work. As the last of them pass by, he hollers, "You missed one!"
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Justice": Wesley Crusher gets the death penalty after tripping and falling into a flower bed on a planet where All Crimes Are Equal.

Puppet Shows

• Fraggle Rock: In "Invasion of the Toe Ticklers", Ma Gorg wants Pa to poison the caterpillar-like creatures that always eat up the little white flowers that bloom in the Gorgs' garden each year. Mokey, overhearing this, takes one of the creatures (which she calls Toe Ticklers) down to the Rock, and the others follow. Without the Toe Ticklers to eat them, the white blossoms mature into yellowish flowers that smell like old socks, begin crowding out the radishes, and are extremely difficult to uproot. The garden is saved when the Toe Ticklers spin cocoons, emerge as flying jellyfish-like creatures called Purple Sproingers, then fly in and eat the stinkweed flowers.

Video Games

• Disgaea D2: A Brighter Darkness: The opening scene features Flonne watering her flower garden when Laharl enters the scene riding on a meteor... and then Etna enters, also riding a meteor.
• Final Fantasy VII: Cloud falls through the roof of Aerith's church and into a bed of flowers.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: The Hila Rao Shrine sits in the middle of a field of flowers that is constantly watched by a woman named Magda, and boy is the lady hell bent on averting this trope. Stepping on them repeatedly will send her in an Unstoppable Rage and she will ram on the intruder to punish him for his trampling. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom follows up several years later, revealing that Magda turned the field into a proper flower garden with Princess Zelda's help — and then Sky Island chunks fell and crushed much of it.
• Paper Mario: Sticker Star: A hapless Toad in Bouquet Gardens is seen bawling over the loss of his precious flower garden, lost to the heavy winds that blowed over the level (courtesy of the Fan sticker). Fortunately, Mario can restore the ravaged parterre with flower stickers.
• Paperboy: One of the many acts of vandalism that Paperboy can commit is riding over flowerbeds.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: Protecting one of these is the goal of some levels; letting the Zombies cross over the flowerbed means an instant death.
• Super Mario Odyssey: Steam Gardens features a secret flower field that is very dear the the Steam Gardeners' robotic hearts. Unfortunately, it turns out the field has been found by Torkdrift, a daisy-like UFO that proceeded to vacuum all its flowers. Mario manages to destroy the monstrosity, but not before it managed to destroy most of the parterre.
• Untitled Goose Game:
  • The first level is an entire garden of flowers and vegetables, just waiting to be destroyed (though only one flower is within reach).
  • The male neighbor has a prize rose, while the female neighbor has a bird-shaped topiary. Damaging both of them is a requirement for progress.

Web Comics

• Subnormality: Exploited in-universe in Hell: in "Can't Win," a damned soul's punishment consists of being put in an area where, no matter what he does, he will always end up enraging a large, violent man who is standing right behind him. The soul figures all he has to do to avoid this is not do or say anything... until the last panel reveals that he's standing on top of said man's flowerbed.
  Large, violent man: MY PRIZE PETUNIAS!

Western Animation

• Clifford the Big Red Dog: Clifford often unintentionally damages the neighbors' garden, one time even stealing an entire rosebush (he put it back).
• Iron Man: The Animated Series: In the pilot, the Big Bad is enraged that a minion of his killed off his begonias while cooling off his drink using cryokinetics.
• Kaeloo: This is a Running Gag with Kaeloo's flowers constantly being destroyed by the main four's antics (either accidentally or on purpose).
• Pac-Man: "Hocus Pocus Pac-Man": Pac-Baby eats his mother's entire flower garden.
• Rocket Power: The kids accidentally destroy Violet Stimpleton's flowerbed, preventing her from winning a gardening contest that she wins every year. They make it up to her by winning a go-cart race and giving her the prize.
• Rugrats (1991): "Tommy's First Birthday": Spike rolls around in the flowerbed of Didi's garden, which is one of the reasons why Tommy wants to eat dog food so he can become a dog. As Spike rolls around in the flowerbed, Lou scolds him to get out.
• The Simpsons:
  • "There's No Disgrace Like Home": Homer ruins a garden while taking his family on a peeking tour of the neighborhood's houses, and has good laugh over it until he realizes that he's standing in his own garden.
    Bart: Whoa, look at this place. What a dump.
    Homer: That's what you think. I just trampled this poor sap's flower bed. (laughs)
    Marge: Homer, this is our house.
    Homer: D'oh!
  • Homer once needed flowers for a float, and so he picked Ned's garden clean.
    Ned: Uh, excuse me neighbor, I couldn't help but notice you picked pretty much all of my flowers.
    Homer: Can't make a float without flowers!
    Ned: Oh, sure enough, but did you have to Salt the Earth so nothing will ever grow again?
    Homer: Heh heh... yeah...
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • "Truth or Square" reveals that Squidward once had a precious flower parterre next to his home that was squashed by a giant pineapple that would later become SpongeBob's house.
  • "Sportz?": Squidward's begonias gets trampled again because of Patrick's and SpongeBob's sports antics, and again in "SpongeBob, You're Fired!"

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