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How to Grow a Garden in Hell
A grower’s guide to gardening in a char-grilled sandpit
Part 1: Know your enemy
The success or failure of a garden ultimately boils down to one main thing: how well suited your plants are to their environment.
This is why my fuchsia-coloured business coach’s advice to “speak to a global market” was a non-starter. Because the way you garden depends entirely on the geographical location you find yourself in. At least, it does if you want to enjoy yourself out there.
There is nothing satisfying, gratifying or fun about trying to grow plants that slowly die a few months after you’ve planted them. Or plants that refuse to grow, or fruit, or flower.
You might think you have a black thumb, or that all you can grow are weeds, but let’s unpack that for a moment. Your garden is full of weeds, right? So something likes to grow there. Just not the plants you are currently choosing. We tend to think that our job as the ‘gardener’ is to work and work to keep a bunch of fussy plants alive. And that our capacity to do so is a reflection of some innate gardening ‘skill’. We take species that don’t especially like being plonked in our hot and sandy backyards and subject them to fertilising regimens, foliar sprays, pest control measures and a whole host of other boring and largely pointless activities, to help them stave off a death that seems only too inevitable.
What if that’s not our job at all? What if our job is to step back and truly get to know our garden - as it already is, not as it could be. To put our energy into understanding the local environment we have, rather than changing it, so that when the time comes to select our plants we are equipped to choose things that will thrive as easily as our weeds do. Because there really is nothing particularly special about so-called ‘weeds’ other than the fact that they are tough and resilient plants that will grow without much effort or care from you.
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