For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

Abbey contrasts cultivated, controlled beauty with the vitality of the unmanaged natural world. Declaring “no preferences among flowers” except that they be “wild, free, spontaneous,” he frames aesthetic value as inseparable from autonomy and ecological authenticity. The mock-violent curses—“Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm…”—are characteristic Abbey: comic hyperbole used to attack domestication, consumer taste, and the impulse to possess nature by confining it. The passage also echoes his broader environmental ethic: reverence for self-willed landscapes and suspicion of technologies and institutions that tame, package, or sentimentalize the wild.