People ask me what books they should read to learn about plants, and I feel like I need to be honest with you and say that the way I learnt about plants was by getting some and then just dealing with whatever problems they have

I do have a lot of books on herbalism etc hanging around for reference, but I don& #39;t really learn anything that way. I learnt about rust fungi because somewhere along the line, my plants got rust fungi. I& #39;m comfortable being wrong and not knowing everything before I begin.

So many people are scared of killing their plants, so they want to study beforehand or avoid unfamiliar species altogether. But death is unavoidable in a garden if you want to grow anything past a season. You have to get used to seeing things wither, and not taking it personally.

I feel this is partly why cacti are so popular. They appear constant, low-maintanence, and undramatic in death. But even with cacti, eventually you& #39;ll have to amputate rot to save the whole. Sacrifice, death and failure are part of growing things. You can& #39;t avoid them by reading.

As if to prove my own point, I just had to clip two rosebuds because of budworm. I didn& #39;t know what budworm was until it actually happened to my own roses. If I left it, nothing would bloom and it& #39;d all be eaten by caterpillars. It& #39;s wild out there and you have to be wild too.