Nandina domestica
1. Nandinas. Leaves the color of cockroaches. Ugly little berries. Often grown in the courtyards of dentist offices. Like nails on a chalkboard.
2. Agapanthus. Often grown in the parking lots of supermarkets. Boring, boring, boring.
3. Impatiens. Especially near the end of their miserable, short-lived little lives, when they get scraggly and twiggy. Rip them out, already!
4. Cannas. I want to love them, I truly do, but they are a 1970s gardening cliche and I just can’t go there. Like those little button-up shirts with the ruffles down the front and the puffly sleeves that have come back for some unknown reason. Hated them the first time; can’t ever go back there.
5. Coleus. See Impatiens. Add pansies to that.
6. Others too numerous to mention: caladium, daylilies, those irritating little marguerite daisies, especially the pink one called “Cobbity,” all ferns, dull and overused landscape shurbs like pittosporum, ivy in all its forms, and houseplants. The sooner they get to the compost pile, the better.
Please, please add azaleas in colors so bright they hurt your eyes inducing temporary blindness to your list!
Speaking of bad flashbacks, how about we add Black-Eyed Susans to the Most Hated list? Terrible foliage that looks like a weed because… well, because it is… coupled with flowers in harvest gold and brown. If only the leaves were a shade of avocado green you’d have the trifecta of 1970s interior design, um, “aesthetics.”