The dirt on gardening

I love gardens and I would love to have a beautiful garden. But I'm an awful gardener. I can't recognize many plants much less know their names or life cycles. Its all very daunting to me.

I know why I'm a bad gardener: I think of gardening as a relentless, back-breaking chore and not as an joyful escape from the stuffy confines of the indoors.

My goal is to put in a couple years of effort to establish a native garden which will hopefully need minimal maintenance on my part from thereon after. I made some serious efforts in this direction in 2006 and planted a bunch of good stuff (except in the wrong places for some of the species). Then I neglected the garden somewhat last year and this year, it appears that I am going to neglect the garden even more on account that I have a newborn.

So instead of a gardening story, I have a link for you to a TED Talk by Michael Pollan on looking at the world from a plant's point of view. Here's a brief synopsis: we humans think that we control plants to do our bidding in our gardens and through agriculture but how different are we from the bees and birds that are unwittingly manipulated by pl1ants that do the work of pollinating and distributing their offspring? After viewing this video, you may not look at gardening the same way again.

(And, if you are up to having your concept of self, subject and object messed up even further, you may be interested in Susan Blackmore's TED Talk on memes and temes)

[This post is part of a Windsor blogburst on gardening]