Learning to Garden from Books and Locals
Google (and now AI) only get you so far.
When you’re new to gardening, Google at first seems wondrous.
It can turn up an answer to every question you can think to ask.
But there’s a reason we don’t structure education curriculum as a completely free-form process, relying on students to supply all the questions and the teachers to supply all the answers:
We’d very quickly get to the point where the students aren’t asking the right questions, or they’ve asked all the ones they could come up with from their limited understanding.
To master a new subject, it helps to have someone else who has experience to lay out for you a path to follow and answer your questions along the way.
This is one reason I love garden books.
You get a start-to-finish deep-dive on a topic from an expert’s experience. Questions are raised that I had never thought to ask, and they’re answered.
I love Monty Don as much as the next person. I love his books, and I find myself in late winter scrolling through archived episodes of Gardener’s World on Amazon Prime while I’m pining for spring planting weather.
Still, every time I do, I’m reminded of a simple fact:
Gardening is local endeavor—a hyper-local endeavor.
I learn things from Monty, but I have to keep in mind his climate and soil in the UK are vastly different from mine in Upstate South Carolina.
This is one reason I love to learn from local gardeners.
They know what they know about how to grow plants here where I live.
There are obviously things that are universally true about growing plants; but there are also nuances about where you do it that ultimately separate the successful from the unsuccessful.
It’s why I started this newsletter: I wanted to curate the collective wisdom of gardeners and farmers in and around Greenville.
The people who grow things here often have insights you won’t find out there.
It’s Both/And
Read more actual gardening books and you will learn more faster.
Follow and engage with more local gardeners and you will learn more faster. (Not to mention, you’ll make friends.)
Let me conclude with an invitation that brings these thoughts together: A free spring gardening event with books and local gardeners!
I’d like to invite you to join me at my favorite independent bookstore in Greenville, M. Judson Booksellers on March 24.
Salon Series: Home Gardening Panel
March 24, 2025 | 5:30pm | FREE
There will be books! There will be local gardeners to answer your questions!
I am on the panel, but I’m most excited to learn from fellow panelists Julie Thompson-Adolf, author of Starting & Saving Seeds: Grow the Perfect Vegetables, Fruits, Herbs, and Flowers for Your Garden and Sarah DuBose, of Sassafras Flower Farm.
I hope to see you there.