My career is landscape management and design began with the training I received from my grandmother, who watched over three-year-old me as I overwatered her begonias and underwatered her petunias. I remember so clearly to this day, putting too much water in one plant, and, when told that it was too much, trying to compensate with the next plant, by putting in only a bit of water from the plastic watering can, and being instructed to add more, and more, and a little bit more, as I rationed out the water drop by drop so as to avoid flooding this plant as i had the other. It seemed so completely arbitrary; that plant needed less water than I had given it, and this plant kept needing more and more and more and more! I spent the next sixteen years of my life frustrated about the varying needs of plants - how do you know?! - through countless doomed violets as an undergrad, wandering through my school's greenhouse and matching the foliage with my envy, and finally met the money tree who I have successfully neglected off and on for nearly six years. I think it continues to live out of gratitude for the night there was a fire in my apartment building, when I grabbed it before running out into the cold darkness.
No comments:
Post a Comment