I Killed My Basil Plant — Can I Still Call Myself a Gardener?
By: Mary Gallagher
Tags: Self-awareness, Life Lessons, Plants, Gardening, Legacy

Life begins the day you start a garden. — Chinese proverb

My mom had the proverbial green thumb and taught me a lot about growing happy plants and my sister is a master gardener, turning a weed patch into a beautiful and fragrant garden overnight. I guess I fall somewhere in the middle: I’ve had my successes but plenty of failures too.

If you aspire to garden, envision a patch of cutting flowers adorning your front yard, or just want to get a few houseplants to flourish inside your apartment, you should get started and just keep trying!

Plants are forgiving and can usually make a comeback no matter how bad you mess up — unless of course, you leave the basil outside on a freezing Colorado night.

I was planning on nurturing my purple basil over the winter, placing it on the balcony on days when the ever-present Colorado sun allowed it to safely sit outside for a few hours. I transplanted the basil from the flower box to a medium-sized container, added the lavender, and a little mint too.

How clever of me! In the spring I’d have three herbs all ready to go outside to start my spring garden.

I get distracted easily so when I opened the blinds on a sunny November morning I saw my whithered basil staring back at me. It looked so forlorn that I felt a real pain at seeing the overnight demise. Yesterday a tall, fragrant plant with purple flowers still attracting pollinators, today a wilted mess.

I’ve been careless a few times before with plants, forgetting to water them, overwatering, exposing fragile leaves to too much sun, transplanting too early or too late in the season.

The most important thing is that I love them and try to nurture them. My mom taught me that talking to plants helps them grow and there is scientific evidence that this is true so I add that to my protocol. It can’t hurt, right?

If speaking kindly to plants helps them grow, imagine what speaking kindly to humans can do! — Unknown

I admit that plants make me a little silly. My husband has a favorite song that makes him think of me. Honey, by Bobby Goldsboro. In one part of the song, the husband finds his wife outside brushing the snow away from a seedling she had planted earlier that year. Never mind the part of the song where he describes her as “kinda dumb and kinda smart” — well, okay that fits too.

My love affair with plants started when I was little.

My mother’s French lilac drew me in with its heady fragrance each spring and I used to stand in front of it inhaling for long moments while my friends called me to the street for kickball. I was overjoyed when my mom clipped some blooms and placed them around the house!

Pussy willow trees captivated my heart when I was young too. It’s obvious why: the name, of course, and the soft fur-like buds that felt like a cat’s velvet paw. If you caught the tree at just the right time you could clip those pussy willow branches and keep a few stems in a vase indefinitely.

Photo by Rafał Rudol on Unsplash

“What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever.” — Mary Jo Putney

I cried the day I came home from Kindergarten and found my pussy willow tree, along with hundreds of other trees in the small woods behind our home, gone — chainsawed to death while I learned my ABCs, 123s, and sang songs about B-I-N-G-O.

My pussy willow tree was resilient though, and the next spring I learned that life can chop us down but our roots remain and we can make a comeback. Imagine my delight when I saw those velvet buds reappear amidst the stumps of other hacked off trees.

Gardening teaches us to keep trying. To be patient and to be willing to learn. You can read all the books you want and plan perfectly, but gardening will humble you. If you don’t like to feel like a beginner, gardening will teach you that we’re always in a learning process.

Gardening will also slow your life down. I also learned from my mom that certain things can’t be rushed. Like baking. And, of course, gardening.

You can no more will the tomato to ripen on the vine than you can the bread to rise. Fail to take time to prepare the soil and all your efforts will be for naught. There is an order to working with living things and humans don’t set the pace.

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” — Lao Tzu

If you’re just getting started with gardening I cheer you on! May I suggest the philodendron for your first houseplant? And some purple basil and peppermint for your herb garden? All are easy to grow and will reward you with simple care…just remember to talk nicely and bring them in when those nights get too cold!