Pride and Prejudice (and Fear and Loathing) in the Garden
Plant lovers have it easy. Their joy in gardening is in nurturing their green, leafy friends, and in helping them to procreate. They have joys and successes and they have their failures as well. And I will not make light of their failures because sometimes what they failed to get to live and reproduce cannot be replaced. I had that experience myself this past week with a cutting of a gorgeous black-leafed geranium that I had been trying to propagate. I had only the one and will not be able to get another.
It looked like I had it. I was ready to hand out cigars. And then something happened - I'm not sure what. I even bought the thing its own humidifier to give it a climate more to its liking. But it upped and died.
So I understand that people whose main interest in gardening is plant-nurturing suffer pain.
And of course there are those for whom gardening is an act of sustaining life - they raise their very food. I can understand that when hail and drought threatens their well-tended crops they feel bad.
Some gardeners garden not to decorate the outside, but to decorate the inside. Their pleasure lies in strolling out on a warn summer morning to cut armfuls of flowers to bring indoors. Sometimes deer will eat a flower that they had counted on for their arrangement before they can bring it in to admire. Seeds sown so that annual flowers can add fragrance to indoor pleasures may be eaten by birds, or fail to germinate. This understandably puts a crimp in their style with which I can sympathize. But they have so many others to enjoy that I can't believe that they sorrow overmuch.
But for those of us whose main interest is in what we create from a combination of those plants - we don't just sorrow. We don't merely suffer pain. We suffer extreme mental anguish!
For those of us whose pleasure is in painting with plants, well - we seem to feel that we are what we garden - and that we will be judged by our creation.
And that can be downright scary!
I understand all the sorrow of other kinds of gardening motivations because every one of them play a part in my own reasons for gardening. I nurture and propagate so that I can have the mass of color, form and texture that my design calls for. If I fail, a portion of my picture fails with it. I had plans for that black begonia - for the three that I had hoped to create from my leaf cuttings. I can't find another plant that will give me the same shape, color and texture. So I need to rethink the picture.
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