How to grow a green thumb

Like Bob Ross and his unwavering belief that anyone can paint no matter their experience level or natural ability, I believe that everyone is capable of growing a beautiful garden. 

Step 1: Notice

Folks out there looking to grow a garden should start with this step: take notice. Look at the gardens around you when you take the dog for his morning stroll. Peak into your neighbors’ garden and see what they’re growing well and what might be suffering. Notice how a plant continues to extend towards the sky when you walk past the same raised bed each and every morning, see what it looks like in a week, in a month. Pay attention to how the changes in weather can make leaves curl, buds drop, or flowers face towards the sun. Even if you don’t know a dahlia from a daffodil, paying attention will allow you to visualize what you like or dislike about a garden. Developing a sense of curiosity is important when it comes to plants. Sure, there are step by step guides all over the internet about how to grow marigolds and what not to do when propagating roses, but so much of my gardening experience has taught me that the rules don’t always apply. As you witness the life cycle of a plant, whether you are an active gardener or not, you start to develop an awareness that will be the foundation of your relationship to the garden.

Step 2: Care

If you start your gardening journey by throwing some zinnia seeds in a pot and walk away for a week, you are going to come back to nothing more than a pot full of dry soil. Sowing seeds is an excellent place for new gardeners to get used to the consistency and attention that growing plant life requires. Sow a seed and check on it every day, twice a day. It needs you to notice when the soil is too dry or too wet or not getting enough sunlight. Once you begin to notice plants, you’ll begin to notice the factors that impact their life cycle. A garden demands unwavering commitment, like any other loving relationship, be it human, animal or otherwise. This, I believe, is where many of us fall short on the pursuit of gardening. It is not easy to grow a garden. Yes, it is relaxing, therapeutic, rewarding, and healthy but it requires persistence and attention. You have to care for a garden as you would a friendship; cast it aside for long enough and you’ll find yourself working very hard to rebuild.

Step 3: Practice

Your ability to garden can easily be improved upon with a little practice, like learning French, playing the flute, or studying math. The difference is that most of what gardening entails is experimenting with nature. No two gardens are the same, no two years carry the exact same weather patterns, and no two gardeners have the same hands-on experience, which means you just have to go for it. If killing plants is indicative of being a bad gardener, then I am absolutely terrible. Each and every year I kill at least a few hundred plants through trial and error, even more to neglect (see Step 2), and a handful are sacrificed so that other plant babies might live. This is where the lessons are learned, skills are gained, and quite honestly, it’s where my obsession stems from. Every time a plant dies, a gardener learns a lesson. The beauty of gardening is that you get to push boundaries, break the rules, and try, try again.

Try starting some seeds and letting them dry out. Watch them shrivel and die without feeling like a failure. Next time, you’ll water them, maybe too much. They won’t grow in the mud, so they rot away. You’ll try again and this time you’ll notice the soil, you’ll take care and keep it moist for a few days until they finally germinate. Little roots break out from the seed casing and take to the soil. Cotyledons (fancy word for a seedling's first tiny leaves) appear and you will feel like you’ve just accomplished something remarkable, you’ve brought a life into existence. Two days later, the thin white stems stretch out.They might begin to look weak and scraggly from a lack of light and maybe you forgot to water again. A little heartbroken, you will go back to square one and you’ll try, try again.

Every gardener has been there

We all start in the same place, not with green thumbs or green fingers, or some natural born ability. We all start with curiosity and a desire to know more about plants, the natural world and how we can participate in it. It is up to you to decide how far you want to take it. You can grow a few annuals by the front door, keep a vase full of cut flowers from your garden all summer, or become a professional gardener. There is no reason why you cannot find success in gardening if you have the desire to do so.

As with any new activity, starting out you will almost certainly fail more than you succeed. Have patience with yourself as you learn. Gardening can be a life-long learning experience that I don’t think any of us can ever truly master. There are an infinite number of ways to succeed and to fail no matter how proficient you become, which I find to be one of the best things about gardening. You get to keep going, year after year, always learning and always growing along with the flowers.

I love this passage from My Lady in Town: A Letter of Feminine Fashion and Thought by Miss O’Conor Eccles from1907. I feel it speaks to my belief that care and attention is often more rewarding in the garden than strictly following the rule book.

Garden Pests.
A friend of mine who loves—I had almost written lives for—her garden, tells me of a drastic remedy for the green fly, which she has lately applied with good results to a very young, and very much treasured rose tree which had been recently bought through the post, and which she feared would contaminate its neighbours. Spraying had failed, drenching had failed, it was a case of kill or cure, so she pulled the whole plant up bodily early in the morning before the sun was strong, and laid it under water in the bath—still slightly warm and very soapy—from which she had herself just emerged, and kept it under water for about five minutes. She then put it back in the garden, keeping it covered with a barrel to keep off the sun for three days. At the end of the time there was not a green fly to be seen, the rose was blossoming unchecked by its treatment, and its neighbours were saved from possible contagion. Of course, one could not apply such treatment to a whole garden, nor would one recommend it to the average gardener, but my friend has what old country women call “a Green Thumb,” that is to say, the gift of making anything and everything grow. Plants will endure liberties at her hands which a less affectionate, though more scientific gardener could not attempt.