COMICS

How an Idiot Like Me Succeeded at Gardening

It all starts with murdering a plant

I’m lucky in that I grew up surrounded by greenery. So as a kid I wasn’t confined to a landscape of paved roads, cement, and walls. Instead, I could see nearby hills full of trees from pretty much anywhere in town. What’s more, my mom had a garden.

This garden, even though it was located on a Mediterranean island, had only partially a Mediterranean feel. To me, it was more of a jungle — and my mom spent hours every week to make it look wild and lush.

Years later, one of my favorite things to do in life is to travel. And my favorite destinations are always tropical. Not for the tropical beaches, though, but for the jungles.

So, when Fabi and I traveled to Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Borneo, we visited countless jungles. And we even slept several times in them while doing jungle treks.

Now, ever since we came back from our trip, we dream of eventually living in a little bamboo hut, surrounded by rainforest, exotic bird calls, monkeys hooting and shrieking in the trees, the roar of a nearby waterfall, and raindrops clacking against the canopy of massive green leaves. That’s why we spent the last two years back home on our Mediterranean island obsessed with plants — and tropical plants specifically.

We didn’t, however, have a garden of our own. Fortunately, though, we had a room that was ours. So we did our best to turn that into a jungle. And for a good three seasons, we succeeded. But when winter came, which people are always surprised to find out is cold in an old Mediterranean house, our plants started to suffer. We suspected it was due to a lack of light since we often had to keep the window shutters closed when it rained.

So, one day, we decided that the plants had suffered enough and had to finally get some light. So we carried them outside onto the shared patio. And — hooray! — the plants seemed happy and started to recuperate. Until, that is, one night it got so cold that hail started to bombard the patio — and thus the plants.

The next morning, they all looked as if some deranged drunkard with a shotgun had taken revenge on them. Half of them died.

We brought the survivors back inside and tried to nurse them back to health. I started reading books about indoor gardening and we bought fertilizer, new fancy soil full of vitamins, and a little shovel to regularly aerate the soil. I also installed an app on my phone to measure the light levels in various corners of our room. We seemed well prepared this time.

For some reason, though, what we ended up nursing weren’t our plants, but something a little more mobile: countless flies, aphids, and bugs. We were gardeners who had succeeded at raising new life out of soil, but it turned out to be the crawling variety.

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