By: Brian Capon
Timber Press 1990, 220 pp, $17.95 US
Most of us gardeners come by our passion, our skills, our knowledge haphazardly. We may have been introduced to the basic idea of gardening as children. It may have been that we helped Pop or Granny plant some seeds in the veggie patch and then we periodically went back to see if the carrot or radish or watermelon was ripe yet. If our mentor were a serious gardener, they would tell us about germination and point out the seed leaves when they emerged, explain that the plant must grow to a certain size before fruit would appear. They would call us down to the patch to show us the flowers that meant the much awaited fruit would soon follow. They would carefully pull aside lush leaves and show us a baby tomato pushing dried flower petals away from the stem.
If our mentor was serious, serious gardener, he or she may have insisted we spend some time each day in the garden helping to care for our charges. We would learn to weed- how to tell if a plant was a weed or the coveted vegetable plant. We would learn that plants have certain characteristics such as leaf shape that help us to decide if they are in deed weeds. We would learn that plants have "roots"- appendages in the dirt that made them hard to pull and that if we didn't pull the roots out of the soil, then we would have to do the job again and it would be harder to do. We learned that when we weeded, we accumulated "dirt" under our fingernails, but that our plants grew in "soil". We learned that plants don't just eat soil. They need water and fertilizer to grow strong.
If mom had a flower garden, we learned that plants could provide pleasure beyond culinary satisfaction; that weeds grew in flower gardens too; that bees liked to visit flowers; that leaf shapes were seemingly infinite; that flowers needed water and fertilizer too.
As children, we were probably given classroom introductions to plants in elementary school grades as well as in high school biology. Over time we absorbed more and more disparate information about the Plant Kingdom and tucked it away in our hungry brains, not knowing that some day we may actually develop a passion for mastering the arts and skills of gardening.
