In Slate’s Cranky Gardener series, there’s only one gardener who really lives up to the title. Granted, it’s been some time since Bradford McKee’s “Hack Job: How Clueless Weekend Gardeners Mistreat Their Plants” first appeared in the online magazine, but every now and then I recall it and recall it with, I should add, a little bit of wonder.

Rather than directing his ire at the relatively safe targets the other cranky gardeners choose (squirrels, the weather), this guy lashes out at the very person who may well represent the core of his readership… the weekend gardener.

Take the captions that accompany his side-by-side visual examples of good and bad pruning, or as the teaser puts it, “the many depredations people commit around the garden”:

On the owner of a forsythia: "The owner of this sad plant prunes off the top each year, taking a page from a developer’s handbook to suburban landscaping, which says that all plants, regardless of their natural growing patterns, should look like gumdrops."

On the owner of a pyracantha, who appears to be, judging from the house in the background, the same unfortunate owner of the gumdrop: "When you lose interest and quit pruning, the plant winds up looking ghoulish, like a tree hung with concertina wire for the holidays, à la the example on the right."

On the owner of a certain unkempt privet: "If you’re not up for the maintenance, opt for a chain-link fence."

My question for this writer – whence the venom?

Maybe it’s professional. The boot-camp style is popular as a form of instruction. And he does seem to really feel for these plants who are variously described as suffering from human maladies of suffocation, starvation, even baldness.

Maybe it’s personal. That all the pictures seem to be taken in the same neighborhood, some even in front of the same house, makes it seem as if the writer has an axe to grind with his own neighbors… (he does seem to have some inside information – “the owner of this sad plant prunes off the top each year.”) Each photo includes enough visual evidence that the landscaper, as well as their neighbors, can identify the outed offenders. I mean, it’s hard to imagine outrage like his being entirely impersonal.

The thing that keeps irking me though is the slight classist tinge to his complaints. Lined up, the concertina wire, the chain-link fence, the police tape (another mistreated forsythia), somehow even the gumdrop (more populist than a lemondrop?) start to paint a picture of the bad end of town.

And maybe I just feel too closely the indictment leveled by the cranky gardener. Having recently leased a smallish plot of crabgrass, two oddly placed hostas and a house that springs solely from an outcropping of mulch – I do long for the Seussian whimsy of the gumdrop shrub.