You're Not Failing, Your Coneflowers Are Just Dead

Plants, like all living things, have lifespans. This fact somehow eluded me for years.

I knew about annuals, biennials and perennials, of course, but in my mind perennials and trees just lived - forever. And if they died after just few years, it was clearly due to my neglect or lack of gardening skills.

Learning that coneflower only lives for few years was a huge relief but also made me think - what other instances of “failure” which was just a natural happenstance did I falsely attributed to my own doing?

And how many times did I remove the “weeds” which were simply parent plant seed sprouts, preventing natural recovery?

What can you actually control?

The summer may be incredibly hot and dry, or rainy and cold. You may get a sudden colony of ants or squash bugs, birds or squirrels, deers or bears.

None of these things can really be controlled.

Racoons have all night to figure out how to get into your garden. Last summer an industrious turtle managed to get into the raised and caged strawberry bed and eat the berries.

Hedge and don’t take things seriously.

I laughed as evicted turtle marched across the yard in a huff. I planted onions between other plants to deter groundhogs. A wide variety of vegetables guaranteed that no matter the weather, something would produce.

Things that I could control resulted in outcome that was not planned but nevertheless successful - because I didn’t measure success in strawberry harvest.

What happens when you step back?

I like growing things from seeds, but learned that sometimes neglected plants thrive while plants I care for don’t produce.

Carefully planted and watered tomato seeds resulted in nothing. Defeated, I transplanted the volunteers sprouted in old patch of dumped garden soil - and they immediately produced a tomato jungle.

The cucumbers, completely ignored, did much better this year - when i did not tie them to trellis, weeded, watered or paid any attention to them at all.

Dedicating effort and resources does not guarantee the outcome. It’s more productive to observe how things unfolding naturally and working with the flow - rather then fighting every variable.

So what is failure, anyway?

I used to think that failure is not meeting expected goals. But now I see it as going against the gut feel, attributing too much impact power to yourself and forcing things to happen.

Failure begins at the moment we define success as a narrow metric, instead of focusing on process as a learning opportunity and observing where it takes us.

As for my garden next spring, I’ll let it be more wild, allowing parent plants to live forever through what I considered weeds.