What Landscape Fabric Really Reveals About the State of Modern Gardening
By Steve Mydelski | Natchez Glen House
The Return of a Product That Was Already Failing
When I started gardening professionally over 20 years ago, landscape fabric was already on its way out.
In the 1990s, it was a standard solution in commercial and residential landscaping—marketed as a way to prevent weeds, hold moisture, and simplify maintenance. But by the early 2000s, those of us working with plants daily had watched it fail. Weed seeds still germinated on top. The fabric frayed under UV exposure. Edges pulled loose. Over time, it became not only ineffective but an active problem.
In my early years, I knew it best as nursery fabric—used temporarily by growers to roll out a seasonal space for containers or temporary sales setups. It was never intended to be planted through. It was never meant to be buried. It was functional, seasonal, and ultimately disposable.
Then around 2015, something strange happened.
As the flower farming movement started gaining popularity online, I started seeing landscape fabric return—not in nursery yards, but in fields marketed as sustainable farms. Small, independent growers began laying hundreds of feet of petroleum-based plastic fabric across their growing areas, often while claiming eco-conscious values.
And they were calling it sustainable.
The Inconvenient Truth: Fabric Replaces People
Here’s something few people say out loud:
Landscape fabric isn’t about weeds. It’s about labor.
It’s a workaround. A cost-cutting measure. A substitute for people.
It’s used when someone doesn’t have the money—or doesn’t want to spend the money—to hire someone else. And I get it. Labor is expensive. It’s unpredictable. But if your business model relies on laying down permanent plastic sheeting because you can’t afford a human being, then you don’t have a sustainable business.
If your marketing copy includes words like “regenerative,” “soil health,” “ecosystem,” “organic,” and “natural”—but your growing beds are built around polypropylene barriers—you’re not running a stewardship-based system. You’re constructing a sales pitch.
This isn’t about shame. It’s about honesty.
Are we building farms and gardens that serve the soil, or are we building systems that serve convenience?
Plastic Is a Forever Decision
I’ve pulled up landscape fabric that’s disintegrated into fiber-laced dust—impossible to remove, embedded in the soil, shredded into the root systems it was supposed to suppress. I’ve seen it physically fuse with the landscape, becoming both toxic and permanent.
This is a forever product.
It doesn’t rot. It doesn’t return to the earth.
It can’t be composted. It can’t be recycled.
It lives in the field, or in the landfill, indefinitely.
And for what?
So a few market-ready flowers can grow in a neater line?
So we can manage fewer weeds without managing people?
That’s not ecological. That’s a shortcut.
What I Learned From Whole Foods
In my early career, I had interactions with a company you may know—Whole Foods, now owned by Amazon. At the time, they were a boutique grocery chain built around buzzwords like “local,” “organic,” and “farm to table.” I had conversations with them about job opportunities, curious about whether their values aligned with mine.
And I walked away.
Because they didn’t.
Even back then—long before Amazon’s acquisition—I saw the marketing machine turning.
Their values weren’t based in soil. They were based in sales.
They were greenwashing: the practice of using eco-language to obscure profit-driven decisions.
Greenwashing, for those who haven’t encountered the term, is when a company or individual uses sustainability rhetoric without aligning their actual practices to that language. It’s a form of narrative manipulation—a way to gain trust or admiration without doing the hard work that trust requires.
I didn’t expect to see that same phenomenon emerge in small flower farms, or from private individuals on social media. But I did. And it continues.
When I see someone running a small-scale flower farm—positioning themselves as sustainable, natural, or community-minded—but laying out roll after roll of landscape fabric, I see the same disconnect.
I ask the same question I asked at Whole Foods:
Why are you doing this?
To what end?
You’re not a multinational. You’re not optimizing for shareholder returns.
So why are you sacrificing the core principles?
Semantic Slippage: When Words Lose Their Meaning
I’ve always been empathetic to the public—especially to gardeners who don’t work in this space professionally. Because there are so many words.
So many loaded words:
• Organic
• Regenerative
• Sustainable
• Local
• Stewardship
• Natural
These terms once meant something. Now they’re marketing tools.
They’ve been semantically hijacked, twisted and repurposed by people who want you to buy their version of sustainability—whether or not it holds up under scrutiny.
And if they were practicing those principles with honesty and consistency? Then sure—earn the dollars. But as the great hip-hop artists have always reminded us:
You have to walk it like you talk it.
I Still Believe in People
Despite all of this, I still believe.
I believe in people.
I believe in gardeners.
I believe in farmers.
I believe that gardens are, at their core, about people.
Environmental stewardship is about people.
It’s about one gardener being able to hire another gardener.
It’s about one farmer being able to pass on knowledge—or pass someone a shovel.
It’s not about giving more money to DuPont, who, by the way, owns the patents to most landscape fabric products on the market.
When we roll out plastic to replace a person, we’re making the exact same value decision that big corporations make every day:
Profit over people.
And I get it—it’s tempting.
It’s hard to find labor. It’s hard to pay for it.
But wouldn’t it be a better story to meet someone like Catherine, someone who shares your passion?
To trade her flowers, or pay her a little, and let her learn?
To build something with someone, rather than instead of someone?
That’s the heart of gardening. And that’s the story I still want to tell.
The Garden Is Not a Shortcut
We have what we have today—our plant science, our techniques, our soil knowledge—because people did the work.
They bled for it.
They spent their lives in the sun and the mud and the greenhouses, testing and trying and failing.
And they passed that down.
That’s why I revere the wisdom of this field.
That’s why I recoil at the quick-fix solutions—especially when they’re marketed under the banner of sustainability.
Because if we’re just promoting the profit of a petrochemical company—or our own brand optics—then we’re not building gardens.
We’re building illusions.
And I’ve spent my career trying to do the opposite.
The Work Lives Outside My Door
Everything I’ve built at Natchez Glen has been built publicly.
When we’ve had to spray, I’ve said so.
When we’ve struggled with labor or sales, I’ve said so.
When it’s been hard, I’ve said so.
I’ve taken the hits.
I’ve shared what I’ve observed.
And I’ve never stopped gardening.
But very few people have sat in my position—
Where for twenty years, your passion becomes your profession,
And your profession lives right outside your door,
And your hands are the ones who made it.
With blood.
With sweat.
With tears.
And with flowers.