NATURAL GARDENING | PHILOSOPHY | TROPICS

How moving to the tropics made me lose confidence in my gardening skills

(for everything of everything I ever learned, the opposite is true)

This story is a sad story. But mainly, it’s a story of humbleness, receptiveness to change, readiness to learn, and the embrace of things being different in different circumstances.

my gardening skills

I have been gardening for the best part of my life. That’s something like 45 years. It’s certainly not an insignificant amount of time.

Yet — all that time, I have been learning.

I think that the secret to good gardening is in the art of observation. And listening.

Observe — is what a gardener does all the time. Wherever you are, whatever you do, wherever you are going — your eye will be on the conditions of whatever it is that grows around you. It may be a humble little wallflower, courageously pushing its way through a crack in the paving stones on the sidewalk. It may be a giant tree, visited by a swarm of bees. A thirsty sunflower in a front garden. Or a potted fern in the shadowy corner of an otherwise lifeless patio.