It’s OK To Give Up

Recently I had a conversation with someone who could never germinate Craspedia globosa seed. Loads of people began adding their various nemesis plants too and the whole thread was a nice cultural example of what gardeners already know. That is; plants are like people.

I’ve always had a belief that there is WWAAAAYY more going on with plants than humans give them credit for. We have an extraordinarily biased idea about what sentience looks like. If it doesn’t move or have an obvious nervous system it’s pretty much just world filler. To be fair a scary number of humans narrow it down even more to; only humans are sentient, everything else is food, pleasure, kicking material or a toilet… Anyway, I digress, I think plants just like people, have the capacity to dislike us.

I made the decision recently to give up growing any Begoniaceae family. I probably brought this on myself as I spent a large portion of my life dismissing the family entirely because of a rancid hatred of B. semperflorens until I became a grown up and was educated about all the magnificent species out there, a large percentage of which I’ve tried to grow from seed, brought in plants, from cuttings, they ALL die eventually, fairly quickly in most cases and I think it’s because they just don’t like me! They would rather expire than be in my company or entertain the idea of bringing me pleasure… it’s an energy thing… and perhaps the family are particularly loyal to the upper classes given their long history together and don’t approve of my socialist ideologies.

It’s not a matter of conditions or technique sometimes. So many people have tried so many different ways to cajole life from plants that they struggle with and yet, so many people still watch the plants die. typically just an incremental fading out of life, leaf by leaf, the slow wilt of “I fucking hate you. Goodbye.”