Some people are blessed with green fingers. Others are blessed with a talent for murdering plants in cold blood, no matter how hard they attempt to nurture & tend. I fall into the second category, as if you had not already guessed.

You would think that, being a person of some limited capability with regard to gardening, I would live in a place consisting mostly of concrete with the occasional indestructible tree defying all my attempts at slaughter. Instead, I live in a garden which stretches the entire length of my house & is at least four times the width.

My garden contains a specimen of just about every fruit tree that can grow in a Mediterranean climate, & includes some rare examples of cacti & palm. In spite of my efforts to take care of it, it has survived for some years on the natural cycle of care provided by Mother Nature.

I attempted to pull down a enormousproboscis which was trying to grow out of the middle of one of my cactus, & it turned out to be a rare flower stalk, which appears only every fifteen years or so, & when it dies the plant dies with it… Luckily I myself did not quite manage to strangle it & the flower grew to be fifteen feet in height, arched over our path, & made a very pretty sight when it began to bloom. The plant did die, though, as expected.

Every spring & summer I spend a fortune on bedding plants, only to plant them in the wrong place where they either have too much sun or not enough of it, or I over water everything & drown it… I spray things with insecticide which are too delicate to withstand the poison & the bugs survive, but the plant dies.

I plant things in pots with other things which should be planted alone, & then one kills off the other. I plant things in pots which are too small or too big, or too shallow, it’s all very confusing.

The worst thing is when one spends a fortune on a magnificent, mature plant to have it wither as soon as it arrives on one’s doorstep. I am sure the plant kingdom works a special semaphore system & instructions to self destruct are passed around the garden centers whenever my trolley appears.

Someone really must write a guide for complete idiots on what plants are the most likely to survive poor care & handling, it would be a best seller.

Jan Gamm writes reflections on life with an emphasis on world travel. She has lived in many countries & traveled extensively in the Far East, the Middle East, America, South America & throughout the South Pacific. She writes for fun & for money whenever she can manage it.