The message
from "Des Higgins" contains these words:

STAY CALM EVERYONE.

For what should be a calm inducing hobby;

Gardeners are almost always energetic, determined and down to earth.
Weilding godlike powers of creativity, life and death in our own
backyard, together with having such a dazzling array of choice in every
seed catalogue, eventually makes us highly opinionated. I can't imagine
how you got gardening mixed up with chanting OM or stamp collecting.

this is a bizarrely hostile
newsgroup.

That suggests you have very little experience of other newsgroups.
This one is notably tame, gentle, clean, restrained etc. But only
because the participants are so good at weeding, cutting, burning and
pest control.

Janet