My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic - Why do the plants have to die?

It takes good writing to make you feel bad for a character,

but it takes even greater writing to make you feel bad for a tree (and a sailor uniform, but I won't lose my way on that).

To understand what I mean, here's the context of what i'm talking about:

You have a series landmark that's been around since the first episode of the series, and it's been destroyed right before your eyes.

And then you have this………

You just had to make it worse, OP…