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Home & Garden Show Soiled by Protesters

MUDCAT FALLS -- Opening day for this season's Home & Garden Show was marred by protesters who stormed downtown's Squash Pavilion and trampled the ornate displays of daffodils, tulips and pansies.

What started out as a noisy, yet orderly protest by the Citizen Landscapers for Agrarian Parity, quickly spiralled out of control when impatient horticultural hustlers, frustrated at the political gauntlet delaying the arrival of potential customers, turned garden hoses on the demonstrators, who then stampeded the lavishly arranged displays of exhibitors.

"Dandelions and chickweed have rights, too, you know," explained CLAP Chairman Digby Dalhaber. "The white European male cabal cannot deny native species the right to exist in their natural wild state. They were all here long before us."

The debate over "land ethics" in North America was given a boost when Sandra Bell sued the city of Toronto in 1997 and won, establishing a new Canadian Charter Right to grow any and all native plants, even varieties deemed noxious or allergenic.

Amidst the food-fight like episode that ensued, the air was filled with screams, panic, petals, leafs, fertilizer, lawn chairs and zoysia plugs, until the authorities arrived. Over three hundred people were treated for minor injuries, including the show queen Miss Pollination, Daisy Scotts, who contracted a nasty case of poison ivy from vines protesters had smuggled into Squash Pavilion as an "improvised infectious device."

"Two-Four-Six-Eight, it's genocide to cultivate," shouted protesters led by second generation civil rights leader Reverend Montgomery Selma Jackson as they were taken into custody by Sheriff's deputies.

Event organizers vowed that the show would go on, though professional landscapers said the rebuilding of the displays would take weeks, if not months, by which time the growing season would be long over for this year.

"It looked like a tornado just ripped right through a Rose Bowl Parade," said Sheriff Atticus W. Moosejowl. "I ain't seen nuthin' like this since Nam -- springtime in Nam, that is."



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