Many people remark that they are incapable of growing plants. “Green thumb? More like a black thumb!” How odd it is that most of us are convinced of our own inability to nurture a living organism. But is it true?
It seems similar to the impassioned insistence, “I can’t cook”; “I’m a terrible cook”; “I never learned how to cook.” We don’t need Michelin Star for every meal; are so many of us really incapable of basic, palatable food preparation?
We seem not to notice that there is a difference between never trying something and being incapable. If you rarely, if ever, attempt to cook anything, you will be a lousy cook. If a self-proclaimed failure in the kitchen starts practicing, though, things begin to change.
There’s a pithy explanation for this: “If you can read, you can cook.” People will tell you that there is no manual for life and that no one will tell you what to do. That’s true as far as it goes, but for many areas of life, there are books detailing a lot of specific information about what you should do. There are these archaic things called cookbooks that detail, step-by-step, how to prepare food, from the most basic to the complex.
This might all sound a bit patronizing, but it’s remarkable how many highly intelligent people assume the “cooking gene” missed them, rendering them incapable of anything beyond scrambled eggs and box mixes. If the “bad cook” is given the chance to cook on a regular basis, he or she may continue to insist on failure, but over time the results improve.
If you try always to make Pinterest creations requiring specialty ingredients and labor-intensive processes, you will waste much time and effort on terrible food. If you follow a basic cookbook to make the rudimentary elements of nutritious and satisfying food, you will become a cook.
Perhaps something similar happens in the realm of plants. In the ordinary days of a city-slicker or suburban denizen, there are no necessary encounters with plants. It’s remarkable to meet a child from difficult circumstances who has never seen vegetables growing in the ground or fruit on branches, only ever encountering them in the alien, misted landscape of the grocery store. Someone so ignorant leaves an impression, but many of us are not much more knowledgeable. In fact, there are probably many children, maybe even our own children, who have never seen their food growing.
What if we spend time with plants? Again, not in a complex way bound for failure to confirm our nagging conviction that we have “a black thumb.” We are not talking about growing all of our food supply in the first year of home gardening. We may not be even talking about growing anything edible. We’re talking about becoming acquainted with the language of plants, their ways of being, and laying to rest the idea that our genius is so overbearing we cannot suffer to cultivate plants like the rest of the people throughout human history.
Where to start? It does not matter, precisely. There are readily available resources on the easiest plants to grow. The most common houseplants are known thus because of their hardiness and resistance to demise due to neglect or overzealous care. The type of plant matters little; it’s the keen sense of friendship that develops when watching an organism grow and develop. It may sound odd to refer to a plant as a friend, but, then again, we live in a time when people consider pets their children. Plants as friends seem none too strange.
Writing for the Federalist, Georgi Boorman describes how gardening contributed to her decision to forego an anti-depressant, which she had been taking for more than a decade. The choice was not reckless or rash, and it was buttressed by a developing interest in cultivating a garden and the many auxiliary benefits: time outside, less time on the internet, and a project of great interest and reward.
One of the most rewarding exercises for a beginner might be propagating. There is this astonishing ability of many plants to spring forth anew from a small clipping or scrap of leaves and stem. When fetching supplies from the gardening store, children might collect flowers and broken bits of vines strewn on the gravel. You can confirm the particulars of plant etiquette in your region, but in most places such picking up of scraps is viewed with mild benevolence. Upon bringing the collections home, a culling of wilting flowers and pitiful pieces is in order.
At this point, you can assess the vines, put them in a cup of water, and see what happens. Sometimes, within days, translucent roots shoot out from the bottom. Other times, nothing happens. Or seemingly nothing.
As St. John Henry Cardinal Newman observed in his “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” “In the physical world, whatever has life is characterized by growth, so that in no respect to grow is to cease to live.” It can seem that little scraps of plants are not growing, but they are not dying. While the unsuccessful attempts turn brown and squishy or shrivel and fade, many plants remain living. And whatever is not dying is growing, though we may not see it at once.
A cutting or scrap of vine may sit in a cheerfully sunny window for a month or more, seemingly with nothing happening. Suddenly, a shoot bursts forth, a leaf coiled and dynamic, begins to unfold. From languishing to growth seemingly instantaneously when, of course, there’s been slow and constant progress all along. Witnessing that pregnant possibility in all living things can be startling to the complacent, those who assumed nurturing plants was beyond them.
Sometimes the simplest ingredients produce surprisingly sophisticated results. When it comes to plants, those simple little scraps that grow roots and begin to unfold into remarkable creations for which we can take no credit but offer only our gratitude for witnessing it—those simple little scraps turn into plants with names like tradescantia and the romance of living is exquisitely realized.
2 comments
Comments are closed.