The Plant Rejects the Gardener

…and it can be just the same with writing

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Let me be clear, I am a truly rotten gardener. It’s not just plants; whole trees have died under my care.

To be fair to myself, I’m a Brit transposed to California, in the middle of the worst drought on record. It’s seriously hard to do well here and save water at the same time; you really have to know what you’re about, and I really don’t. Even after ten years, I’m still busking it.

And, of course, every gardener kills a lot of plants. It goes with the territory. Sometimes it’s even deliberate.

However: “I don’t know what I’m doing” is a confession, not an excuse. I’ve had plenty of time to figure things out. There are books, there are YouTube videos, there’s a whole worldful of media willing and eager to help me out and make me better informed; there are official accredited Master Gardeners of my acquaintance locally, and other people who have simply been gardening here a long time, and are always happy to share their wisdoms; and there’s the simple expedient of trying and failing and learning from experience. I guess I have done a little of the latter, but it’s been much more a case of trying the same thing again and hoping for a different result. Which — yeah. Not so much, really. It’s like having not ten years of experience here, but the same year repeated ten times.

I water my plants reluctantly (it’s the gardening equivalent of washing up the dishes: necessary but inherently uninteresting, and sufficiently lengthy a process that by the time that’s done it’s all too easy to feel that this particular slot in my day has now been filled, and it’s time to go and do something else altogether), irregularly and not enough. I feed them pretty much on the same schedule, which is to say irregularly and not enough. I neglect early signs of disease, for in all things I am the very opposite of proactive. I love having freshly gathered fruits and veggies in the kitchen, but I put off the actual harvesting because I want both to have my cake and to eat it, and thus the rats and squirrels and other raiders often get to pick more than I do.

[About now, if you read the subtitle above, you should be thinking “Oh glory, he’s going to force this legendary ineptness into some kind of writerly…