Yet my experience did not teach me how to view my garden holistically. Until now I have been working on patches of land. In the beginning I was only thinking about a particular plant. I would look for a place for it no matter where and hope that it would grow.I did have some knowledge about my soil. And it was rich heavy clay. Still I hoped that certain plants would grow no matter what. They didn't. Ignorance has costed me many gorgeous plants. I believe that this was my first step in learning about gardening. That I had to change. That the plant should be followed, looked at and taken care. That is in garden. There are plants which seem to grow in kind of conditions, on large arrays of soil and suffering a bigger range of adverse conditions. I love this kind of tough plants. They are the machos of gardens, they can hold a garden together even in its worst moments. And there are the dames, which require a very strict treatment, specific soil, and climatic conditions. And there is also a middle class, which can be sometimes very moody. I had to learn that when gardening plants are in charge and I am the perpetual student. So instead of sacrificing anymore exemplares, I had to balance my desire to grow a plant and the real possibility of doing so. On the one hand I decided in a rush that I have to follow two paths, one of giving either the best possible condition, and the second to push the limits. Sometimes, neglecting a plant to the worst, produces magnificent surprises. But that only "sometimes"... The rest of time I am rather inclined by the desires of my plants. And when you have hundreds or even thousands in your garden you become a very busy person.   Being very weather dependent, and the weather on this Coast is terribly capricious, no planning is possible so I simply have to go along and trying to stay on top of things. What a delusion! For work in the garden is never finished and the amount of it depends on the degree of control I desire to have upon the garden.This tells me what kind of gardener I am, and, at the same, with circumscribes the notion "garden".

What is a garden then? A rack of Streptocarpus under growlights? It might be. It might be, indeed, the garden of a passionate who has no other means of gardening. It might look like an urban attempt towards green. Or it might be mere perplexity afore other forms of life than human. As long as this means deattachment from the urban, densely populated life, the rack of Streptocarpus has its healing role.