Now, I know it is late for me to say this, but it seems a shame that BYU needs to get rid of all its house plants after spending so much to get new ones for the LSB.
Still, it is hard to argue for aesthetics when that wrecks a budget. If BYU has better things to do than water in-building plants, they can try to dispose of them. This is no cause to buy more silk plants, however.
Fake plants are already common across campus, so areas with neither plants nor silk plants might stick out. (I'm not sure; they can be somewhat non-intrusive.) Indeed, some of the rooms that now have plants may have been designed with that option in mind, so the white-space balance might be thrown off by the exit. Yet the silk plants that replace the interior vegetation would serve to me as a reminder of what had to be let go. The areas that were classy enough to have real plants before should be classy enough, now, to be elegantly unadorned.
Gail Jardine
Bellevue, Washington