I have a number of friends and acquaintances who shall remain nameless and who always kill plants. I think we all have people like this in our lives. Usually, they like to ask us as gardeners what they are doing wrong, while often revealing they believe it is their destiny to have a black thumb. As compassionate gardeners, we comfort them, advise them, and try to inspire them to keep trying. We nurture these people like we care for our plants, with concern for their needs and desires. We even offer them begonia cuttings we have propagated, divisions of perennials, seedlings of vegetables and annual flowers, and even an occasional small tree or shrub that has come up in our garden. And we receive plants in return from others. I was the recent recipient of a small stewartia that showed up in a friend’s garden and I am always so grateful for such gifts — and so sorrowful if I don’t succeed in giving these plants a healthy home. With this is mind, I work hard to make sure I do what I can to understand the plant’s needs so that it will prosper in my garden.
However, I have recently come to wonder if we should question why we are sentencing the plants we carefully cultivated to a certain death by putting them into the hands of a self-professed black thumb. I have one such friend to whom I have passed along innumerable plants and often even helped with the potting or transplanting of my offerings. She has killed almost every seedling and plant that I have given her, and while recounting her latest murder to me the other day, she professed, “I am still learning about such things.” As I looked about her backyard—a veritable cemetery of offerings I have given over the years—I wondered to myself if she meant she was learning to garden or if she has been taking lessons from a serial killer who has her honing her skills at murder.
I was too polite to ask (but not too polite to write about it without identifying her). And it was at this moment that I began to see her as one of those people terminally on a dating site wondering why they can’t meet anyone. As she talked to me about the pot of sempervivum I had given her, I shared with her what the plants need—some light, a reasonable amount of moisture (although they are fairly drought tolerant) and that is about it. When she told me she preferred to keep them in a dark spot on her porch because that is where she wanted them to be and that she was heading off for a few weeks and did not have anyone to water them while she was away, I began to understand that her black thumb was the result of not considering the plant’s needs, but simply her own desires.
It reminded me of someone I consulted with in the city who wanted to fill her tree well with sun-loving annuals so something would be in bloom all season long. When I explained that the tree well, which held a great big maple growing in it and had little soil, would not be likely to give the marigolds she wanted what they needed to survive, she said, “Well, I will try anyway.” Needless to say, she failed (and while her failure may have taken a toll on her ego, its real toll was on these plants who left this earth in an untimely manner. It would be dishonest for me not to profess that I was relieved they were common marigolds and not some rarified perennial, but that topic involves an examination of my own soul and I will save this topic for another day.
I point out this lesson because even many seasoned gardeners can lose sight of a plant’s needs over their own desires. I cannot help but think that black thumb is a code phrase for people to avoid, not because they are not good gardeners, but perhaps because they may not be able to take your needs into consideration along with their own, and what sort of friends do such people make? In the moment in which we live, such an approach is not uncommon, but I really think we can all do a little better on this front and that we should all consider cutting off communication with those that don’t.
I write this with a full understanding that we all inevitably make mistakes, experiment with the conditions a plant may need, and even kill with kindness, such as when we overwater a cactus in our attempts to care for it. However, if a friend or acquaintance has a reputation as a serial plant killer or a horticultural black widow, you may want to assess how that relationship is working for you. And the next time you have a begonia cutting to offer to someone, you may want to give it to someone who has the curiosity to ask you about the plant’s needs and not simply their own.
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A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
