For the most part, I am competent in the garden. I can identify plants and plant families and my stuff generally looks good and blah, blah, blah. Some would say I have a "green thumb."
I am here to tell you there is no such thing. Anybody who says there is? LIAR!
Conversely, there is no such thing as a "black thumb." There's the ability to figure out what is making a plant unhappy and knowing how to fix it, perhaps, but it's not like there's some invisible plant mojo that some people have that others don't.
Here, let me prove it, if only so it can make one or two people feel better about the dead stuff in their yards.
I have seventeen identical rose bushes in our front yard. They look absolutely amazing this year.
Photos really don't do them justice. Seriously, they're stunning right now. While I have carefully pruned them, amended the soil around them, and whispered sweet nothings in their . . . uh . . . leaves, I can't take credit for how good they look. If I did, I'd have to take the blame for this:
Rose bush Number 18 is sad. Like, REALLY sad. I'm probably going to have to replace it which WAAAAAH! The roses on either side of it? Happy. Last week it looked fine. A little on the small side, but fine. Then it got its panties in a wad and now I have no idea what it is so cranky about. There is it, mysteriously dying while surrounded by life.
Another mystery is this hydrangea:
I've probably had that thing ten years. It survived two moves, including one that came with a year of living in a kiddy pool. And, yet, it just decided not to come back this spring. Last fall it was huge and covered with blooms. Now? Nada.
Or, how about the Boxwood Dilemma? I have about 40 of them lining our front landscaping. Most of them are really quite healthy, but there are a couple that got bad frostbite this spring and decided to just give up.
There is no logic that can explain how a bush that is here can be fine while another one that is over there, a whopping six inches away, is suicidal. NO LOGIC.
Some other mysterious deaths include my delphinium which just plain vanished over the winter (I'm blaming all of that cold, miserable weather) and the purple variety of these:
There were two purple ones directly in front of that pink one. They were all intermingled last year, but this year the purple is gone. The pink is HUGE and happy, but no purple. WTH?
Lest you think my garden is full of failures, there are plenty of unexplainable successes as well. Like, these daisies:
I planted them from seed last spring with the thought that even if only one survived, the $1 for the seed packet was better than buying a full-grown potted shasta daisy for $10. Instead of just one, though, I have 20 . . . maybe 30? I have a hella lot of daisies is what I have.
And then there is my friend the peonies. I have three varieties of them, but I couldn't tell you which is what because they haven't bloomed in FIFTEEN YEARS. Seriously, I've had them that long. I know that they don't bloom because I move them too much and because I have a bad habit of planting them too deeply. But even when I try crazy hard to fix those two little issues, still no blooms. Until this year.
I literally did a happy dance when I saw that the blooms on that sucker had opened. A real, true, actual happy dance. Our neighbors must find me SO amusing, which I suppose is better than if they thought I was insane. Which they probably do. (They might be right.)
See? The people who you think have a green thumb manage to kill plants, too. Except, I prefer to blame the plant because, seriously, I did NOTHING to piss off that rose bush. Dammit.