Ultracrepidarian Musings

“It is a happy thought to believe that our gardens smile at us and hold for us a genuine understanding. At the same time, we must not forget that of all the humorous things in a garden, we who pretend to be gardeners, are the funniest.”
Louse Seymour Jones, Who Loves a Garden

Here’s an adjective you might not know you needed. But you do. Ultracrepidarian: of a critic, giving opinions on something beyond his or her knowledge. Example: I have a relative whose ultracrepidarian pronouncements on subjects ranging from antelope colostomies to zebra vasectomies belie his/her almost total ignorance of the subject at hand.

Um, I know somebody like this. Don’t we all? They’re probably the people who would order bacon yogurt from this menu.

Immediately before they express an authoritative but stupid opinion, these people typically say: “You know… (insert something you presumably don’t know)…” On second thought, perhaps my anonymous relative is a mere crepidarian, (rather than the superfluous conjugate) seeing as how he/she often begin conversations propounding on topics he/she clearly knows nothing about with: “I could be wrong, but…”

Everybody has an opinion once in a while, even, surprisingly, me. I’ll even concede that some peoples’ opinions are sometimes based on their life experience as minor characters in the reality show I star in. Other times, well, let’s just say such people apparently live in a world where they are seemingly the only people who know not to touch the fire on the stovetop, and it’s their mission to save us all from burning our fingers. Of course, you can’t reason with such people. You’re more likely to win an argument if you make shit up and change your position with impunity as the argument progresses.

So, why haven’t I learned not to participate in such conversations? These days, too much of my energy is devoted to maintaining a white-knuckled grip on the throat of my own reality, leaving me little energy to spare arguing with morons, let alone trying to shine the clear light of my reason into the dark corners of their paranoia.

Which is where my garden comes in. That, and my twisted sense of humor. Judgmental, ultracrepidarian opinionated, know-it-alls probably also know more about gardening than I do. They know why one design scheme failed, why my pepper and eggplant seeds never germinated, what kind of caterpillars munched my fennel into skeletal stems. At times like that, I remind myself that I’m only pretending to be a gardener. What I’m really doing outside in the back yard is cultivating my own peace of mind.

Adventures in Planting Seeds

“There was a small girl of Leeds
Who planted what she thought were seeds,
These she watered each day
But I’m sorry to say,
They never came up, they were beads!”
- Louise Seymour Jones, Who Loves a Garden

Failure already? Four entire seed packets (2 eggplant and 2 peppers), planted March 4 and nothing to show. How is this fair? Then there’s the thunbergia and sacred lotus, planted a mere week ago, and still nothing. I soaked the thunbergia and lotus seeds overnight in water with a little inoculant added. I even drilled tiny holes in the lotus seeds: shaped like black marbles and let them soak overnight before planting. I did the same with some seeds of Kapok (Ceiba pentandra) a friend liberated from the specimen adjacent to the Huntington Garden mansion. I expect the big and/or thick shelled seeds will take more patience, but it’s still discouraging to see several trays of peat pots looking empty as the day they were planted.

My home-made potting mix was probably infected with damping off. Or despite being covered with a plastic shower curtain on cold nights, the warm-season seeds were probably scared to death of the cold. Or perhaps I planted beads. I might as well have for all I have to show.

I’m having more luck in the real garden, where mustard seed sprouts already fill a large pot. I’ve got sprouts in the herb garden, but won’t know what they are until they’re a bit more grown-up. I think one of my hop vines is sprouting, but it could be a purple hyacinth bean, put in the same place at the same time.

I make no pretense of having a green thumb. Just because I like to garden doesn’t mean I’m any good at it. I can’t cultivate lush tropicals because I’m just too negligent. Exotic flowers don’t survive my benign neglect. While I no longer murder plants that don’t belong in my Zone 9 yard, I tend to push the envelope, with the degree of success a 15year old with a learner's permit would have in trying to jump their car over 6 school buses. I don’t have tall shade trees beneath which I can plant understory forest plants of my childhood: violets and lilies of the valley. I tend to (un-humbly) blame my environment for my gardening failures, making me slower to learn the horticultural lessons I most need to master.

Enthusiasm takes a gardener only so far. Cultivating patience probably takes one a baby step farther down the garden path. After that, a certain amount of skill is required – or at least a minimum of horticultural knowledge, and humility in the face of Nature. I expect I’ve got more in common with the small girl of Leeds when it comes to gardening savvy than I do with a genuine gardener. Now that I think about it, those lotus seeds did look an awful lot like beads…