It’s a fear I am forever hearing from my friends, on social media, even down the pub: “I would love to grow plants, but I killed my last one.” For timid first-timers, it seems, the idea of plants dying is one that fills them with dread, so much so that it put off even the most nature-loving ones from embarking on their horticultural adventure.
So I’ll let you in on a secret: I have killed plants, too. In fact, even though I get paid to tell people how to grow them, I have killed hundreds, maybe even thousands. And when I get together with my best mates, who all happen to be professional horticulturists at places like Kew Gardens and the Royal Horticultural Society, you know what we talk about? The plants we’ve recently killed.
You see, no matter how many scientific trials you trawl through, or how many conventional home-gardening books you read, at the heart of it there is really only one way horticulturists learn – particularly with the more challenging species – and that is by trial and error. Just as you would never expect a master baker to have never burned a cake or had a meringue collapse, there is really no substitute for hands-on experience, and in gardening this comes in the form of dead plants. Sometimes lots of them. In my case, lots and lots of them.
Ironically, despite fear of failure appearing to be a huge psychological barrier to many people, it’s this willingness to not be put off by unsuccessful attempts that’s the hallmark of what makes one a good horticulturist. It’s the ability to take it for what it is: a hugely useful learning experience, that you can apply to your future efforts to make you even more successful.
As plant growth can be affected by hundreds of environmental factors, many of which may either be unknown to, or not communicated in the standard horticultural advice, the real plant-growing breakthroughs usually come not from slavish devotion to this received wisdom, but through actually ignoring much of it. It’s this sort of experimentation that meant that camellias, once assumed to be delicate tropicals that require enormous heated glasshouses, were found to be perfectly happy outdoors in UK winters when the heating in some great houses failed.
Likewise, the reason why most of the council estates around me in west London have giant, often fruiting, avocado trees must be that people ignored (or were unaware of) all standard gardening advice that they won’t survive at temperatures below 10C. Similarly, the huge trend for growing moth orchids in glasses of water, with no potting media at all that’s taken Instagram by storm, also runs directly contrary to the standard advice to keep them “moist but extremely well drained” at all times.
That’s why I passionately believe there is only one secret to a green thumb: perseverance (and a whole lot of dead plants). Of all the quotes in horticulture there really is none more true than: “In gardening there are no mistakes, only experiments.” Time to get experimenting!
Email James at james.wong@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @Botanygeek
