History Main / NeglectedGarden

So, when someone falls into despair and stops taking care of their beloved garden, what happens? Plants and flowers wither and die, fruits and vegetables are devoured by pests, weeds move in to cover the soil. Dead trees with empty branches stand like guards over the place. Eventually nothing is left of the once-happy place but dead plants and weeds, yet the gardener is still too depressed to care, or perhaps they left long ago. If the garden is in a greenhouse, the windows might be broken with smashed glass everywhere.

* Averted in ''Anime/HelloSandybell''. After the death of the Countess of Wellington, Sandybell swore to always take care of her garden, as the kind Countess loved flowers. Sadly, Sandybell's father also dies, and she has to move to London to live with his best friend, Mr. Longwood. Before she leaves UsefulNotes/{{Scotland}}, Charles, George and David promise her that they will always take care of it in her place.

* ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6607756/1/eden eden]]'': At the end of the story, Courtney abandons the garden that was her pride and joy for many years, and sets off to find new meaning in her life. Part of her motivation is never being able to confess to Ruby that she loves him and having to watch him instead fall in love with, and eventually marry, Sapphire. When Ruby visits, he finds the garden already dying, overrun by weeds and ivy.

* ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverseTheMovie'' Shows that [[spoiler:Pink Diamond]] had a private planetoid as her garden, where she abandoned Spinel by pretending they were playing a game. After thousands of years, most of the plants are withered, the water is fouled from their remains and what isn't dead has overgrown Spinel, who loyally remained in the same spot. When she moves for the first time in eons, she has to rip her way out of the overgrowth.

* ''VideoGame/TheWalkingDeadSeasonFour'': In episode two, "Suffer The Children", [[PlayerCharacter Clementine]], [[MadBomber Mitch]] and [[CombatMedic Ruby]] go to gather some supplies in the school's abandoned greenhouse. Nobody's been there in years and it has since fallen into disrepair. [[spoiler:Inside, the three find the zombified Ms. Martin, the school's nurse and the only adult who stayed behind with the pupils when all the adults left at the start of the apocalypse. Ms. Martin was also responsible for caring for the plants in said greenhouse. The player can either burn her body or give her a proper, "human" burial right next to the greenhouse she so loved so much when she was alive.]]

* ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublicIITheSithLords'': Alluded to. After the sundering of the Jedi Order following the Mandalorian Wars and Jedi Civil War, the Jedi Temple on Coruscant lays abandoned and the few surviving Jedi are scattered throughout the galaxy. Kreia laments that "The Room of a Thousand Fountains has gone silent," which was a room filled with fountains and greenery that was a place that many Jedi would meditate in.

* ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublicIITheSithLords'': Alluded to. After the sundering of the Jedi Order following the Mandalorian Wars and Jedi Civil War, the Jedi Temple on Coruscant lays abandoned and the few surviving Jedi are scattered throughout the galaxy. Kreia laments that "The room of a Thousand Fountains has gone silent," which was a room filled with fountains and greenery that was a place that many Jedi would meditate in.

* ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublic2'': Alluded to. After the sundering of the Jedi Order following the Mandalorian Wars and Jedi Civil War, the Jedi Temple on Coruscant lays abandoned and the few surviving Jedi are scattered throughout the galaxy. Kreia laments that "The room of a Thousand Fountains has gone silent," which was a room filled with fountains and greenery that was a place that many Jedi would meditate in.

* ''Literature/{{Nemesis}}'': The Bradbury-Scott sisters' garden is run down and neglected, with particular prominence given to a collapsed greenhouse overrun with vines. The neglect started at the time of Verity Hunt's death [[spoiler:and is partly to conceal where her body is buried]].

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Trolls}}'': The Troll Tree, the Trolls' home at the beginning of the movie, was kept caged by the Bergens so that they could eat Trolls on Trollstice and taste happiness without any problems. When the Trolls escaped from the Troll Tree, the Bergens were left depressed over time, and the tree had already died by the time Poppy and Branch show up to Bergen Town. [[spoiler:The Troll Tree is eventually restored at the ending when the Bergens are shown that happiness was always inside them.]]

* ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverse'': In "Back to the Kindergarten", Steven, Amethyst, and Peridot visit the Beta Kindergarten, a desolate canyon used to grow Gems thousands of years ago. They try to liven up the place by planting sunflowers, but the next day they return to find the plants all dead.

So what happens when someone falls into despair and stops taking care of their beloved garden? Plants and flowers wither and die, fruits and vegetables are devoured by pests, weeds move in to cover the soil. Dead trees with empty branches stand like guards over the place. Eventually nothing is left of the once-happy place but dead plants and weeds, yet the gardener is still too depressed to care, or perhaps they left long ago. If the garden is in a greenhouse, the windows might be broken with smashed glass everywhere.

Gardens are hard to take care of. They have to be watered and weeded regularly, harvested every season (if it's a fruit or vegetable garden), kept safe from hungry pests and other animals, covered up in the winter, and more. By that definition, anyone who regularly maintains a garden has to put a lot of effort into it to keep it alive. A beautiful, healthy and vibrant garden teeming with flowers and fruit clearly has had lots of love put into it.

A variation of this trope can happen when a character is trying to maintain a garden, but isn't good at it (or something else out of their control is killing the plants), with the failed garden symbolizing a loss of hope. In this case, the dead garden is the cause of the character's unhappiness, rather than a side-effect of it.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Trolls}}'': The Troll Tree, the Trolls' home at the beginning of the movie, was kept caged by the Bergens so that they could eat Trolls on Trollstice and taste happiness without any problems. When the Trolls escaped from the Troll Tree, the Bergens were left depressed over time, and the tree had already died by the time Poppy and Branch show up to Bergen Town. [[spoiler:The Troll Tree is eventually restored at the ending, when the Bergens are shown that happiness was always inside them.]]

* ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverse'': In "Back to the Kindergarten", Steven, Amethyst and Peridot visit the Beta Kindergarten, a desolate canyon used to grow Gems thousands of years ago. They try to liven up the place by planting sunflowers, but the next day they return to find the plants all dead.

* ''VideoGame/{{Plantasia}}'': A fairy named Holly has to grant a wish to a depressed man named Jack, who wishes that his estate's gardens were fixed. They're overrun with weeds, plants, pests, and rocks; you, as the player, have to plant and raise flowers while clearing rocks, killing pests, pulling out weeds, and using mana harvested from the flowers to repair the garden statuary. [[spoiler:We find out that Jack was once a talented gardener, but stopped caring for the estate after his wife Julie died.]]

* In Isaac Watts' didactic poem ''[[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sluggard_(Watts) The Sluggard]]''[[labelnote:*]]Best known these days for being parodied as "The Voice of the Lobster" in ''Literature/AlicesAdventuresInWonderland''[[/labelnote]], the title character, among his many other vices, is too lazy to maintain his garden.

->''I don't think she hired [the landscapers] this year. It must have been a jungle in July and August. Now it’s a dead jungle. The grass is knee-high and dead-brown, littered with the husks of weeds and fallen branches. The scraggly perennial bushes are choked with dry vines. The stump of the maple that used to hold up my tree house is rotting. It’s like she doesn’t even know she has a backyard.''

* ''Ghostly Towers'': The reader is on a mission to recover a diamond necklace from the long-abandoned and haunted Oastley Towers estate (nicknamed "Ghostly Towers"). Needless to say, the grounds are very overgrown and untidy, to the extent that sometimes the ghosts are so ashamed that they return to do some gardening.
* ''The Rough Patch'': Played with. Evan doesn't outright neglect his garden following his dog's death, but he does destroy it and tend to the weeds that grow in place of the flowers that once bloomed there.

* ''{{Literature/Wintergirls}}'': Lia's mother is stressed over her difficult, emotionally draining job as a cardiologist and her daughter's anorexia. Her garden hasn't been taken care of in a long time and is covered in weeds and dead plants.

* ''{{VideoGame/Plantasia}}'': A fairy named Holly has to grant a wish to a depressed man named Jack, who wishes that his estate's gardens were fixed. They're overrun with weeds, plants, pests, and rocks; you, as the player, have to plant and raise flowers while clearing rocks, killing pests, pulling out weeds, and using mana harvested from the flowers to repair the garden statuary. [[spoiler:We find out that Jack was once a talented gardener, but stopped caring for the estate after his wife Julie died.]]
* ''{{VideoGame/Undertale}}'': The tree in front of Toriel's house is dying and surrounded by fallen leaves, and she has a dead-looking potted plant in the foyer. [[spoiler:They represent her separation from Asgore, who loves gardening and used to take care of the plants in their home.]]

* ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'': In "Magical Mystery Cure", the Mane Six's cutie marks have been switched around, with Pinkie Pie getting Applejack's cutie mark and being put in charge of the Apple family farm. Unfortunately, she's terrible at farming, causing the farm to fall into disrepair. She's seen looking despairingly at an empty, bare-branched apple tree as its last leaf blows away, while in the background there are dozens of similarly empty trees.

Sub-trope of EmpathicEnvironment and FisherKing. May be related to HorribleHousing, EmptyFridgeEmptyLife, and BadBedroomBadLife. Sometimes qualifies as OOCIsSeriousBusiness if the character is usually a NatureLover or CaringGardener, and may be a sign of a HeroicBSOD. Compare TooUpsetToCreate, TooUnhappyToBeHungry, and SilenceOfSadness for other tropes about characters not doing their usual because of their low mood.

* Played with in "The Rough Patch". Evan doesn't outright neglect his garden following his dog's death, but he does destroy it and tend to the weeds that grow in place of the flowers that once bloomed there.

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-->Who lived here?
-->He must have been a gardener that cared a lot,
-->Who weeded out the tears and grew a good crop,
-->And now it all looks strange.
-->It's funny how one insect can damage so much grain.